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Ghanaians voted in an election seen as a close fight between President Nana Akufo-Addo and his longtime rival John Mahama, in a country long viewed a beacon of stability in a troubled region.
\t On Friday, internet and international calls were cut off across the West African nation in anticipation of the election results, according to locals and international observers in the capital, Conakry.
\t This was the third time that Conde matched-up against Diallo. Before the election, observers raised concerns that an electoral dispute could reignite ethnic tensions between Guinea's largest ethnic groups.
Prosecutors sought Monday to overturn former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo’s acquittal last year on crimes against humanity charges stemming from his alleged role in post-election violence that killed 3,000 people nearly a decade ago.
Gbagbo and former Ivorian youth minister Charles Ble Goude have both been unable to return to the West African nation since their January 2019 acquittals under the terms of their release set by the International Criminal Court.
“In the second ground of appeal, the Prosecutor submits that the majority erred in law and/or procedure in acquitting Mr. Gbagbo and Mr. Blé Goude without properly articulating and consistently applying a clearly defined standard of proof or approach to assessing the sufficiency of the evidence at this stage, judge Chile Eboe-Osuji said.
In the second ground of appeal, the Prosecutor submits that the majority erred in law and/or procedure in acquitting Mr. Gbagbo and Mr. Blé Goude without properly articulating and consistently applying a clearly defined standard of proof or approach to assessing the sufficiency of the evidence at this stage.
In appealing that decision, the prosecutor’s office said that decision was “legally and procedurally defective such that it cannot have the legal effect of dismissing all charges against M. Gbagbo and Mr. Ble Goude.”
Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a princess of the Egbado clan of the Yoruba people, is best known as the goddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Bonetta was born in 1843 in what is now southwest Nigeria. Her parents names are unknown as are the names of her siblings who were all killed in the 1847 slave raid that made Bonetta a captive.
Bonetta’s village of Okeadan was attacked by King Gezo of Dahomey, the most notorious slave trading monarch in West Africa in the early 19th century. Intent on capturing slaves and killing those not taken, Gezo’s men seized the four year old girl. For reasons that are unclear, the girl was not killed and remained at Gezo’s Court until 1849 when British Commander Frederick Forbes’s landed the HMS Bonetta in Dahomey to persuade Gezo to give up slave raiding and trading. Forbes noticed the young girl and bargained for her life. He persuaded King Gezo to “give” her to Queen Victoria, saying “She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” The girl remained with Forbes in West Africa for the next year where she was baptized and given the name Sarah Forbes Bonetta. Forbes wrote that “She is a perfect genius; she now speaks English well, and [has] great talent for music… She is far in advance of any white child of her age in aptness of learning, and strength of mind and affection…”
Sarah Forbes Bonetta was taken to Great Britain and met Queen Victoria on November 9th, 1850 at Windsor Castle. The Queen was impressed by her intellect and entrusted her care to the Schoen family in Palm Cottage, Gillingham when Forbes died early in 1851. The Queen declared Sarah her goddaughter and paid her tutorial expenses. Young Sarah became a regular visitor to Windsor Castle.
Less than a year after she arrived, however, young Bonetta developed a cough believed to be caused by the climate of Great Britain. Queen Victoria arranged for her to be sent to what she believed was a better climate for Bonetta in Sierra Leone. There she was educated at the Female
John Morrow was a teacher, scholar, and diplomat who became America’s first leader at two key postings, the West African country of Guinea, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
He was born John Howard Morrow on February 5, 1910 in Hackensack, New Jersey to John and Mary Hayes Morrow. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree (A.B., 1931) from Rutgers University, Morrow also earned his Master’s degree (M.A., 1942) and his Doctoral degree (Ph.D., 1952) both from the University of Pennsylvania. He also studied in France, receiving an advanced certificate from Sorbonne, University of Paris (1947).
Morrow began his career as a secondary school teacher in Trenton, New Jersey (1931-1945) and Bordentown, New Jersey (1935-1945). He then moved to Alabama where he became a Professor of Modern Languages and Head of the Department at Talladega College (1945-1954). Atlanta, Georgia was Morrow’s next home as he taught at Clark College in Atlanta (1945-1956). He then headed to the North Carolina College at Durham, now called North Carolina Central University (1955-1959). Throughout these academic postings, Morrow developed “a scholar’s command of Latin, French, and Spanish, and a reading knowledge of German and Portuguese.” Morrow also engaged in research on French colonial administration, including in West Africa, for many years.
This expertise and language abilities led to what many saw as a questionable appointment by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959. In that year, Eisenhower appointed Morrow, as the first U.S. Ambassador ever, to the newly independent African country of Guinea. Having never previously held a government job, Morrow was nonetheless unanimously confirmed by the U.S. senate as the nation’s Ambassador to this country which had been called “the new battleground in the East-West Cold War.” Morrow’s nomination was also problematic for many because he was a black man being appointed to such a key post at that time. A Washington Post editorial called the appointment of
Brother Liam and Brother Gedalya destroying the Lie that all Blacks come from Africa. We are the Israelites that was made slaves in West Africa by the Africans and Arabs according to King James 1611 Bible.
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The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was created by the Treaty of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria, on 28 May 1975. It was created to promote economic trade, national cooperation, and monetary union, for growth and development throughout West Africa.
A revised treaty intended to accelerate the integration of economic policy and improve political cooperation was signed on 24 July 1993. It sets out the goals of a common economic market, a single currency, the creation of a West African parliament, economic and social councils, and a court of justice, which primarily interprets and mediates disputes over ECOWAS policies and relations, but has the power to investigate alleged human rights abuses in member countries.
There are currently 15 member countries in the Economic Community of West African States. The founding members of ECOWAS were: Benin, Côte dIvoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania (left 2002), Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Burkina Faso (which joined as Upper Volta). Cape Verde joined in 1977.
The structure of the Economic Community has changed several times over the years. As of 2015, ECOWAS listed seven active institutions: the Authority of Heads of State and Government (which is the leading body), the Council of Ministers, the Executive Commission (which is sub-divided into 16 departments), the Community Parliament, the Community Court of Justice, a body of Specialized Technical Committees, and the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID, also known as the Fund). The treaties also provide for an advisory Economic and Social Council, but ECOWAS does not list this as part of its current structure.
In addition to these seven institutions, the Economic Community includes three specialized institutions (the West African Health Organisation, West African Monetary Agency, and the Inter-governmental Action Group against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in West Africa) and three specialized agencies (ECOWAS Gender and Development
Some Senegalese mosques opened their doors on Friday after the government eased coronavirus restrictions, but others judged the rate of infection too high and stayed shut.
Senegalese President Macky Sall said this week that public prayers could resume in the West African country, provided that mosques obey social-distancing rules.
In the seaside capital Dakar on Friday, according to AFP journalists, thousands of worshippers flocked to Massalikul Jinaan mosque -- which is one of West Africa's largest and belongs to the powerful Mouride brotherhood.
Mosque spokesman Mor Daga Sylla told AFP that religious authorities had insisted the faithful wash their hands and keep one metre away from one another.
Major mosques in the capital, such as the Dakar Grand Mosque and Cheikh Oumar Foutiyou mosque, said this week that they would not open again, for example, citing health risks.
More than a million African soldiers served in colonial armies in World War II.
May 8, 1945, marks the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the German armed forces and the end of the Second World War in Europe.
More than a million Africans served as combatants as well as war workers and carriers in World War II for the colonial powers - more than half enlisted by Britain with the rest serving France and Belgium.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Allied landing in Provence in southern France, President Emmanuel Macron expressed gratitude for the contribution of African soldiers in defeating the German forces occupying France.
Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, himself a former colonial soldier, put it like this in a 2015 interview with DW: \"In war, we saw the white men naked and we have not forgotten that picture.\"
Officials from the UN, West Africa and the African Union (AU) have met an influential Muslim cleric behind demonstrations against Mali's beleaguered president, the coalition behind the protests said on Monday.
Tens of thousands of people joined a rally in Bamako last Friday to demand the resignation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who was re-elected in 2018 for a second five-year term.
The alliance which organised the protests said \"a delegation from the international community met Imam (Mahmoud) Dicko\" on Sunday.
Its members came from the UN's peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA; the AU; and the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), a 15-nation bloc that includes Mali, it said in a statement.
MINUSMA spokesperson Olivier Salgado said the head of the peacekeeping mission, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, \"along with representatives from regional organisations, met certain organisers (of Friday's rally) but also with representatives of national authorities... to find ways of renewing dialogue.\"
Up until now, the only black person to serve as a member of parliament since Portugal returned to democracy in 1974 was a man – Helder Amaral who represented the conservative CDS party between 2002 and 2019.
History was made last October when members of Portugal’s new parliament took office.
Among them were the country’s first black women lawmakers who all trace their origins to Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa.
For the longest time, black people in Portugal were not fully considered as Portuguese citizens because of a 1981 law that was passed before their parent’s immigration status was regularised.
The three black women who made it to parliament were all activists who, during their campaigns, promised to fight these inequalities.
Now, as restrictions on businesses begin to slowly lift and the state continues to introduce its plans for reopening, it will be up to the people to determine how we will continue fighting this pandemic day-by-day—and make sure our houseless community members are not left behind.
Mutual aid programs are a part of the legacy and tradition of Black communities throughout America and the Diaspora.
From sou-sou origins in West Africa to the Black mutual aid societies during Jim Crow and the Black Liberation Movements in the 1960’s, our communities have always been able to tap into our collective power by using mutual aid programs as a way to care and look out for one another.
While we are overjoyed with gratitude for the local business owners and volunteers who are supporting our most vulnerable community members during this time, 2020 is the year that requires more from everyone in America; and in a big way.
That’s why we’ve included My Black Counts educational materials in our mutual aid support bags for houseless community members to learn more about our Get-Out-the-Count movement.
In 1934, with the assistance of Speranzeva, Dunham established the Chicago Negro School of Ballet and a company, a Negro Dance Group, which advanced into the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.
She did her anthropological field work in the Caribbean as a graduate student in 1935, receiving a Rosenwald Fellowship to study traditional dances in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Haiti, where she became close to Haitians and took up the Vaudun religion.
Dunham took her Negro Dance Group to New York in 1937 but did not attract wide attention there until 1939, when she choreographed “Pins and Needles,” a satirical revue produced by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Beyond her theatrical career, Dunham did pioneering work in the field of dance anthropology and founded a school that embodied multi-cultural principles decades before the term was used in the field of education.
Her books include “Journey to Accompong” (1946), “A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood” (1959), “Island Possessed” (1969) and “Dances of Haiti” (1984)
Dunham received some of the most prestigious awards in the arts, including the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Albert Schweitzer Prize (presented at Carnegie Hall), Kennedy Center Honors and decorations from the French and Haitian governments.
WASHINGTON, May 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Idris Elba on Friday called for urgent action and creative solutions to prevent a looming hunger crisis in poor countries, where food production and transport have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
With 60% of employment in Africa in agriculture, \"that's an awful lot of people who are going to suffer and not eat because of the crisis and ongoing effects,\" Elba said.
Coronavirus is set to almost double global hunger by the end of the year, putting an additional 130 million people at risk because of cut-off trade flows and loss of income, according to the World Food Programme.
IFAD has pledged $40 million to the new U.N. fund and is providing cash transfers to farmers, distributing seeds and fertilizers and in some places negotiating with authorities to get food to market.
\"The combined effects of climate change, exacerbated by the locust outbreak, exacerbated by COVID means there's been a complete disruption in all food supply chains,\" said Sara Mbago-Bhunu, director of IFAD's East and Southern Africa Division.
The establishment of an Oversight Board to make rulings about content moderation on Facebook and Instagram indicates the company's determination to promote the rights of users and freedom of expression, Afia Asantewaa Asare-Kyei, a human rights lawyer and Programme Manager at the Open Society Initiative for West Africa has said.
The Ghanaian who has been appointed by Facebook to serve as a Board Member of the newly constituted body said the board was expected to provide an avenue for people to challenge Facebook's decisions on content moderation adding that its decisions would be transparent and binding.
The board is one of Facebook's high-profile efforts to respond to criticism over how it handles problematic content and transparency around its decision-making.
The 20 member board Ms Asare-Kyei said would review certain content decisions by Facebook and Instagram and make binding decisions based on respect for freedom of expression and human rights.
Ms Asare-Kyei joins two other Africans - Julie Owono, a digital rights advocate and Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières from Cameroon and Maina Kiai, a human rights activist and Director of Human Rights Watch's Global Alliances and Partnerships programme from Kenya on the board.
The current situation remains extremely alarming in East Africa where Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia continue to face an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods.
Thereafter, there is a risk that swarms will migrate to the summer breeding areas along both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border as well as to Sudan and perhaps West Africa.
Mature swarms are still present in some places and a few of these swarms moved into southeast South Sudan (Kopeata East district) on 14 May and northeast Uganda (Moroto district) on the 20th.
In Ethiopia, control operations continue against breeding in the south as well as hopper bands and several mature swarms further north in the Somali region near northwest Somalia.
There is a risk that a few swarms from spring breeding areas in Arabia and East Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia) could reach the eastern part of thee Sahel in eastern Chad starting from early June if they migrate before the summer rains commence.
Monrovia is the capital of Liberia as well as its largest city. It is located on Bushrod Island and Cape Mesurado along the Mesurado River. A 2008 census showed its population as 970,824.
Monrovia was founded on April 25, 1822 by members of the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization created to return U.S.-born former slaves to Africa. ACS representatives first arrived on the Mesurado River in 1821. The original name of Monrovia was Christopolis. In 1824 it was renamed “Monrovia” after James Monroe, who was the American President at the time as well as a supporter of the American Colonization Society. The indigenous populations of the areas surrounding Monrovia felt that the city was built on stolen land and began attacking it as early as 1822. Those attacks continued sporadically until the mid-nineteenth century.
Monrovia’s first settlers were former Southern slaves. Not surprisingly the early architecture of the city was largely influenced by the style of the Southern antebellum buildings.
Monrovia grew slowly during the rest of the 19th Century. After the Civil War the American Colonization Society was taken over by emigrationists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and Bishop Alexander Crummell. They urged post-Civil War African Americans to settle there and many of them did until World War I. These Americo-Liberians, both those in the initial wave of settlement in the 1822-1848 period (Liberia became independent that year), and those who came after the U.S. Civil War, politically and culturally dominated the city.
After World War II growing numbers of indigenous people from the interior of Liberia began migrating to the capital to exploit new job opportunities. Always present in the city back to its founding, by 1950 for the first time, they were the majority of the city’s residents.
In 1980 Sergeant Samuel Doe of the Liberian Army led a coup which toppled the existing government. For the first time in its history Liberia was controlled by indigenous people rather than Americo-Liberians. Doe
Yet food and forest production systems, as well as native environments around the world, are just as threatened by emerging epidemics.
Under restrictions on human movement - necessary to curb the virus' spread - the field and laboratory work that are crucial for surveillance and management of plant diseases has been severely curtailed.
Biosecurity relies on four things: prevention (at port of entry); preparedness (early detection, diagnostics and control); response (to contain and eradicate or manage plant pests and diseases); and recovery (systems for regulating eradication, management or restoration).
Once a pest is introduced into one country a whole continent's food, forestry and native systems could be threatened.
Firstly, an assessment is needed of the impact of the original COVID-19 responses on plant health biosecurity systems, so as to plan for coming months and years.
As black America remains under an ongoing murderous and unrelenting police occupation, black social scientists have continued performing their much-needed work as the demand for true justice grows by the day.
In these countless numbers of cases, police officers (predominantly white males) have even slaughtered black America’s women (Sandra Bland, Texas) and children (Tamir Rice, Ohio).
The 22-page report on this study examines black oppression by society-at-large, poverty, and the downright criminal element within America’s primarily white male-dominated local police forces.
Hitchens and her two other co-authors also provide the empirical data that is needed to fully understand the impact of black America’s nightmarish reality.
The hundreds of years that highlight the oppression of blacks in America is nothing short of devilish and vile.
In the following account historian William L. Katz revisits an essay he first wrote in 1968 as the introduction to the reprinted volume of William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization which was first published in 1832. In the article below he describes the first mass protest meeting at Philadelphia in 1817 that eventually led to a nationwide black rejection of African colonization and compares it to the Black Lives Matter Movement that grew out of local protests in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri over the killing of Michael Brown. Katz notes that in both Ferguson and Philadelphia nearly two centuries earlier, a “grassroots” protest arose which became so powerful that established African American leaders were compelled to join and support it.
In January 1817 nearly 3,000 African American men met at the Bethel A.M.E. Church (popularly known as Mother Bethel AME) in Philadelphia and denounced the American Colonization Society’s plan to resettle free blacks in West Africa. This gathering was the first black mass protest meeting in the United States. The black leaders who summoned the men to the church endorsed the ACS scheme and fully expected the black men who gathered there to follow their leadership. Instead they rejected the scheme and forced the black leaders to embrace their position.
The genesis of this remarkable meeting can found in the early efforts of Captain Paul Cuffee, a wealthy black New Bedford ship owner. After an 1811 visit to the British colony of Sierra Leone which had been established to receive free blacks and later recaptives -- blacks freed by the British Navy from slaving vessels taking them from Africa to the New World -- Cuffee envisioned a similar colony for African Americans somewhere in West Africa. To promote his vision, Cuffee, at great financial loss, brought 38 black volunteer settlers from the United States to Sierra Leone in 1815.
When he returned to the United States with news of the resettlement he persuaded many of the most influential black leaders of the era
“The family of George Floyd will like to acknowledge the message of solidarity resolution and virtual tribute from His Excellency Nana Akufo-Addo, the President of Ghana.
For them, the victory in the praise was the fact that through his gestures and tribute in the wake of Floyd’s death, Akufo-Addo had won some goodwill for Ghana.
However, in spite of Akufo-Addo’s attempt to add to his feats, this time, the portrait was tainted by how police in Ghana on Saturday evening dispersed Black Lives Matter protesters in the center of Accra with brute force.
But since Saturday night, some of the protesters have said they believe the aggressive response of the police was motivated by other issues they highlighted in their protest, including the unsolved case of recent kidnapping and murder of three girls in Western Ghana.
As the issue of Ghana’s own police brutality against mostly the country’s poor was debated on social media, Accra-based social justice activist and artist, Nii Kotei, took the opportunity to remind his followers on Twitter about episodes of brutality he has been noting since 2019.
Before Insecure star Jay Ellis would secure a leading role opposite Issa Rae in the hit HBO dramedy, he featured in a Ghanaian film about a traditional Ewe custom known as trokosi.
Trokosi has been the way of the Ewe people for centuries but in the face of modernization, or rather honestly, westernization, director Leila Djansi, urges abandonment of something African.
Other times, a young girl may be committed as a trokosi to a shrine as a symbol of the family’s gratitude to the deity of the shrine.
For as long as the priest of the deity would allow, women serving under trokosi would be housed at the shrine.
Governments in the three West African countries where trokosi is still practised have tried different means of rescuing the young women, from negotiations with local religious leaders to the threat of force carried by the state.
On July 2, 2009 President Barack Obama appointed Gayleatha Beatrice Brown to be the United States ambassador to Burkina Faso, a nation in West Africa. This was her second ambassadorial appointment. Previously, Brown had been appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Benin, a post she held from 2006 to 2009.
Brown was born in Matawan, West Virginia on June 20, 1947. Her family moved to New Jersey when she was a child and she graduated from Edison High School, in Edison, New Jersey in 1964. She received bachelor’s and master’s honor degrees from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1968 and 1970, respectively. Brown also did post-graduate work in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Before joining the United States Foreign Service in 1982, Brown was a Special Assistant at the Agency for International Development (USAID). She was later Assistant Administrator for Africa and a legislative assistant to the House of Representatives.
Brown had had extensive overseas experience before her ambassadorial appointment. Her first posts were, successively, as Development Officer at the U.S. Embassies in Paris, France and Abidjan, Côte dIvoire. She also served as Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, and U.S. Consul General and U.S. Deputy Permanent Observer (concurrently) to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. She was Chief of the Economic and Commercial Sections at the U.S. Embassies in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She was also desk officer at the U.S. State Department for Canada, Senegal, Guinea, and Mauritania.
Brown has represented the Department of State at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at Credit Arrangement negotiations, and she was a Desk Officer for the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM).
Brown’s honors and recognitions include the Lady of the Golden Horseshoe (West Virginia state
Europeans have been interested in African geography since the time of the Greek and Roman Empires. Around 150 C.E., Ptolemy created a map of the world that included the Nile and the great lakes of East Africa. In the Middle Ages, the large Ottoman Empire blocked European access to Africa and its trade goods, but Europeans still learned about Africa from Islamic maps and travelers, like Ibn Battuta.
The Catalan Atlas created in 1375, which includes many African coastal cities, the Nile River, and other political and geographical features, shows how much Europe knew about North and West Africa.
By the 1400s, Portuguese sailors, backed by Prince Henry the Navigator, began exploring the West coast of Africa looking for a mythical Christian king named Prestor John and a way to the wealth of Asia that avoided the Ottomans and the powerful empires of South West Asia. By 1488, the Portuguese had charted a way around the south African Cape and in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached Mombasa, in what is today Kenya, where he encountered Chinese and Indian merchants. Europeans made few inroads into Africa, though, until the 1800s, due to the strong African states they encountered, tropical diseases, and a relative lack of interest. Europeans instead grew rich trading gold, gum, ivory, and slaves with coastal merchants.
In the late 1700s, a group of British men, inspired by the Enlightenment ideal of learning, decided that Europe should know much more about Africa. They formed the African Association in 1788 to sponsor expeditions to the continent. With the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, European interest in the interior of Africa grew quickly.
Geographical Societies were formed and sponsored expeditions. The Parisian Geographical Society offered a 10,000 franc prize to the first explorer who could reach the town of Timbuktu (in present day Mali) and return alive. The new scientific interest in Africa was never wholly philanthropic, however. Financial and political support for exploration
