Former health secretary will no longer become special envoy for UN’s economic commission for Africa
Matt Hancock, the former UK health secretary, will no longer become a special envoy for the United Nations, after the job offer was withdrawn.
Hancock said on Tuesday he was “honoured” to be working with the UN’s economic commission for Africa (UNECA) to help the continent recover from the pandemic.
Continue reading...Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who directed the acclaimed drama, reveals the struggle to portray his community ‘with dignity and compassion’
“I am Somali and I made this film for Somali people to watch a film in their mother tongue without needing subtitles,” says film director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Ahmed made his feature debut with The Gravedigger’s Wife, and after premiering in May at the Cannes film festival’s Critics’ Week, it made headlines as the first film from Somalia to be put forward for the Oscars.
“As a film-maker, I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” says Ahmed, who was born in Somalia before moving to Finland as a teenager.
Continue reading...Kenyan police say they have arrested the husband of the distance runner Agnes Tirop, a two-times world championship bronze medallist who was found dead at her home.
The 25-year-old Tirop, who represented Kenya in the 5,000 metres at the Tokyo Olympics, was stabbed in the neck with a knife. Police said on Thursday they had arrested Emmanuel Rotich in the coastal city of Mombasa, hours after pleading with him to surrender.
Continue reading...Decision follows hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for four Egyptian security officials to be tried in absentia
A court in Rome has suspended trial proceedings against four Egyptian security officials accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo, following hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for the men to be tried in absentia.
The trial was returned to a preliminary court, after judges debated for seven hours about whether hearings could continue amid any doubt they were aware of proceedings against them.
Continue reading...ICJ ruling aggravates fractious relations between two countries and threatens to destabilise restive region
Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has rejected a decision by the UN’s highest court to grant Somalia control of disputed waters in the Indian Ocean, saying it would “strain relations” between the neighbouring countries.
The president accused the international court of justice of imposing its authority on a dispute “it had neither jurisdiction nor competence” to oversee after it delineated a new boundary that gives Somalia territorial rights over a large portion of the ocean, which is thought to be rich in oil and gas reserves. According to the new maritime border, Somalia has gained several offshore oil exploration blocks previously claimed by Kenya.
Continue reading...The accused, all members of the National Security Agency, are being tried in absentia after the researcher’s kidnap and killing in Cairo
A court in Rome has begun the trial of four Egyptian security service officers accused of killing an Italian researcher, Giulio Regeni, five and a half years after his mutilated body was found in a ditch by a road in Cairo.
Italian prosecutors accuse Gen Tariq Saber, Col Aser Ibrahim, Capt Hesham Helmi, and Maj Magdi Abd al-Sharif of the “aggravated kidnapping” of Regeni, while Sharif is also charged with “conspiracy to commit aggravated murder”. Kidnap carries a potential sentence of up to eight years in Italy, while Sharif could receive a life sentence.
Continue reading...Competition opens to find six young creators in sub-Saharan Africa who will be funded to produce movies for 2022
For Nelson Mandela they were “morsels rich with the gritty essence of Africa but in many instances universal in their portrayal of humanity, beasts and the mystical.”
Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage.
Continue reading...Group of more than 300 descendants of people born under Italian rule accuse state of ‘crime of colonial racism’
Hundreds of Eritreans of Italian descent who trace their ancestry to the period of Italy’s colonial rule are demanding Italian citizenship, a right denied to them by Benito Mussolini’s racial laws.
A group of more than 300 grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people born to Italian fathers and Eritrean mothers have written to the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, and other government officials urging them to “finally examine and resolve an issue that has never really been addressed, a crime of colonial racism that marked the life of thousands of innocent women and men, and which continues to discriminate against generations of Italians”.
Continue reading...One of Kenya’s leading athletes, Agnes Tirop, has been found stabbed to death at her home in Iten, with police treating her husband as a suspect. The 25-year-old athlete, who broke the women-only 10,000m road record last month and also won bronze medals at the 2017 and 2019 world championships, was discovered by police on Wednesday after being reported missing by her father.
Tom Makori, the head of police for the area, confirmed that Tirop’s husband was a suspect after going missing. “When [police] got in the house, they found Tirop on the bed and there was a pool of blood on the floor,” he said. “They saw she had been stabbed in the neck, which led us to believe it was a knife wound, and we believe that is what caused her death.
Continue reading...India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind
Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.
While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year.
Continue reading...The creation of the modern, interconnected world is generally credited to European pioneers. But Africa was the wellspring for almost everything they achieved – and African lives were the terrible cost
It would be unusual for a story that begins in the wrong place to arrive at the right conclusions. And so it is with the history of how the modern world was made. Traditional accounts have accorded a primacy to Europe’s 15th-century Age of Discovery, and to the maritime connection it established between west and east. Paired with this historic feat is the momentous, if accidental, discovery of what came to be known as the New World.
Other explanations for the emergence of the modern world reside in the ethics and temperament that some associate with Judeo-Christian beliefs, or with the development and spread of the scientific method, or, more chauvinistically still, with Europeans’ often-professed belief in their unique ingenuity and inventiveness. In the popular imagination, these ideas have become associated with the work ethic, individualism and entrepreneurial drive that supposedly flowed from the Protestant Reformation in places such as England and Holland.
Continue reading...The offensive marks the end of a ceasefire declared in June in a political conflict that has claimed thousands of lives
Tigray forces say Ethiopia’s government has launched its threatened major military offensive against them in an attempt to end a nearly year-old war.
A statement from the Tigray external affairs office alleged hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian “regular and irregular fighters” launched a coordinated assault on several fronts. It blamed Ethiopian forces and those from the country’s Amhara region, where much of the recent fighting has occurred after Tigray forces retook much of their own region in June.
Continue reading...Kais Saied will technically head administration after paring back powers of PM’s office
Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, has appointed a new government by decree, 11 weeks after firing the last one in a power grab, as the country faces acute economic and political crises.
State television broadcast a swearing-in ceremony of the cabinet headed by Najla Bouden, the north African country’s first female prime minister.
Continue reading...On the World Day Against the Death Penalty, the tide is turning in west Africa against this tool of colonial repression and racism
In July, Sierra Leone became the 23rd African country to abolish the death penalty. Although its use across the continent has dwindled – thanks to concerted efforts from human rights organisations and governments – the death penalty remains on many more countries’ statute books due to its strong colonial legacy.
During the colonial period, punishments that were being abandoned in Europe found fertile ground in Africa. Among them was the death penalty, which was deployed as a key element in the mechanism of colonial repression.
Continue reading...Mali president’s office pays tribute to the courage of Gloria Cecilia Narváez as it confirms her release
A Franciscan nun from Colombia kidnapped by jihadists in Mali in 2017 has been freed, Mali’s presidential office said.
The statement on the presidential Twitter account paid tribute to the courage of Gloria Cecilia Narváez, who was held for four years and eight months.
Continue reading...Thin characterisation and a superficial critique of wealth inequality post-apartheid keep Uga Carlini’s fiction in first gear
The colourful opening of Uga Carlini’s Angeliena suggests a giddy ride awaits: the camera follows a suitcase plastered with travel stickers moving along a conveyor belt at an airport. But such vibrant detail only points up the film’s lack of emotional substance. A parking attendant for a posh hospital in South Africa, Angeliena (Euodia Samson) dreams of travelling the world, she adorns her little shack with tourist posters from faraway lands. At work, Angeliena brings a glow to the austere parking lot, pinning red roses that she grows herself to the windscreen wipers of fancy SUVs.
Such sweet-natured actions are presumably intended to endear Angeliena to us, yet reduce her to a unidimensional worker with a heart of gold. The thinness of the characterisation is made more pronounced by the cartoonishly evil Dr Mitchell (Colin Moss), the hospital owner and Angeliena’s antagonist, a spewer of Trumpian one-liners. Ludicrously, the film takes a tone-deaf turn when Angeliena is revealed to be suffering from an unnamed muscular atrophy that motivates her to finally embark on her world trip. Out of the blue, she develops facial tics. The only affecting sequences are the few-and-far-between gatherings between Angeliena and her eccentric female friends.
Continue reading...Cuthbert Mutukwa fears disastrous consequences for home country if UK cuts go ahead as it nears ‘mine-free’ status
A Zimbabwean man who helped clear hundreds of landmines from the Falkland Islands has urged Britain not to go ahead with cuts that would see the government pull funding from his home country just as it nears “mine-free” status.
Cuthbert Mutukwa, 42, left his family in Zimbabwe to work for two years de-mining the Falkland Islands, the British overseas territory that was peppered with about 13,000 mines by Argentinian forces during the 1982 war.
Continue reading...Raids by the security forces leave at least one man dead, as official observers decry ‘inhumane’ detention conditions
More than 5,000 refugees and migrants have been arrested by the Libyan authorities in the past week with some allegedly subjected to severe physical and sexual violence, before being held in increasingly “inhumane conditions” in detention centres in Tripoli.
Many of those arrested escaped wars or dictatorships across Africa, and have already undergone years of detention. They were intercepted at sea trying to reach Europe by the EU-supported Libyan coastguard.
Continue reading...Fishmeal exports to EU from west Africa have grown sharply, depleting stocks and posing threat to livelihoods
Greenpeace activists have intercepted a 96-metre tanker in the Channel carrying fish oil from west Africa to Europe, to highlight the threat they say industry poses to food security and to livelihoods in the region.
Trade figures analysed by Greenpeace Africa show that fishmeal and fish oil exports from Mauritania alone have grown by an “alarming” 16% during 2020. Activists and locals say the industry pushes up prices and depletes stocks of fish eaten by local people across poor communities in Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia.
Continue reading...Ndakasi died in arms of her ‘lifelong friend, Andre Bauma’ says Virunga national park in DRC
Ndakasi, a mountain gorilla that famously posed in the background of a selfie taken by rangers at Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has died at 14 after a long illness, the park said.
“It is with heartfelt sadness that Virunga announces the death of beloved orphaned mountain gorilla, Ndakasi, who had been under the care of the park’s Senkwekwe Center for more than a decade,” a statement from the park said.
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