South Africa: Africa celebrations rock Jozi and Pretoria – Cultural festivities weekend

 

Pretoria (South Africa) — Johannesburg and Pretoria were abuzz with several cultural festivities this weekend ahead of Africa Day on Monday.

Organised by the Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Joburg and SABC2, this year’s celebrations included a feast of African music, dance, cuisine and crafts.

Africa Day celebrates the day when the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed in 1963. The OAU was the precursor to the African Union (AU). The day is used to acknowledge the progress that Africans have made, while reflecting upon the common challenges faced a global environment.

Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana explained that Africa Day was a special event because it provided an opportunity for people to pay tribute to previous generations who fought for Africa unity.

Festivities kicked off on Saturday with an event for children at the Union Buildings Southern Lawns in Pretoria. Children were treated to soccer matches and had their faces painted with the flags of the nations participating in the Confederations Cup.

The annual Africa Day concert was held at Johannesburg’s Mary Fitzgerald Square, featuring Nigeria’s Asa, Yuri of Angola as well as South Africa’s own Soweto Gospel Choir, Gang of Instrumentals and the Parlotones. Meanwhile, House music from DJ’s Oskido and China took over the dance floors at the Baseline and Cappelo Restaurant in Newtown’s Restaurant.

On Sunday, a rendition of Handel’s Messiah was held at Regina Mundi in Soweto and a symposium was held in partnership with the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) secretariat at the African Cultural Museum in Pretoria.
Ms Xingwana was expected to attend the event to debate the role of education and culture in African development with intellectuals and representatives of civil society.

On Monday, the African Renaissance Africa Day Concert will be held at Durban’s Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre. This concert forms part of the 11th annual African Renaissance Festival taking place at venues in Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Richards Bay from 25 to 30 May. The festival is held during the last week of May to coincide with Africa Day and is the only annual celebration of the African Renaissance ideals on the continent.

Music lovers will enjoy a line up of popular musicians including Thandiswa Mazwai widely known as lead singer of the popular kwaito group “Bongo Maffin”. She released her solo album “Zabalaza” in 2004 and was signed with an American label later that same year.

Also performing is Oliver Mtukudzi, better known as “Tuku”. He is a best-selling artist in his home country of Zimbabwe and his musical career spans over 20 years and 40 albums. Described as one of the greatest soulful voices of African Music, Tuku’s enduring popularity is largely a result of his powerful lyrics, which invariably deal with social and economic issues, and which are injected with an infectious sense of humour and optimism.

Tickets for the concert cost only R50. The organisers had wanted to kept the ticket price low to ensure as many people as possible are able to participate in the Africa Day celebrations. “The various events planned around Africa Day were an exemplar of Africa’s diversity, vibrancy and the richness of our heritage,” said the department’s acting Deputy Director General, Rosemary Mangope.

“Whether it’s music and dance at Ivory Park, or the incredible exhibition of African artifacts at Museum Africa, our culture and heritage are being showcased in all their breathtaking diversity and beauty,” she said. She said her department is proud to support an event that encompasses the breadth of African excellence through the arts to such stunning effect.

source.BuaNews (South Africa)

Africa: Forty-six years on, continent can be optimistic about the future (opinion) – May 25, is the African Liberation Day

 

Kampala (Uganda) — Today, May 25, is the African Liberation Day. I congratulate all Africans on the continent and in the diaspora for celebrating this historical moment.

The day honours the 1963 signing of the charter establishing the Organisation of the African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU). It pledges solidarity for the liberation of Africa.

The OAU was criticised for not living up to the mandate of uniting Africa and responding to its various challenges. Many of the criticisms were understandable though not all of them were deserved.

The OAU was set up to finish the anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s and also unite Africa. Read Nkrumah’s book: Africa Must Unite. It was successful on the liberation of southern Africa from racist settler regimes and former Portuguese colonies of Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. The organisation mobilised human and material resources across Africa in support of these struggles and also won diplomatic and political support internationally. Its weakness, therefore, should not cloud some of its success.

The charter, signed in 1963, was a compromise between the radical Casablanca states, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Tubman of Liberia and Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who wanted the immediate political union as opposed to the conservative alliance represented by Monrovia and the group of states who found a credible spokesperson in Mwalimu Julius Kambarege Nyerere of Tanzania.

Although Nyerere was not a conservative, he was opposed to Nkrumah’s fast-tracking and urged for a functional unity (economic unity before political). Today, we have the same debate on the United States of Africa.

The division was superfluous because the economic co-operation did not happen due to lack of political will. It would have been a complimentary process of concrete political and economic programmes to advocate a shared vision of unity.

The promised compromise on the charter also included an agreement that the borders inherited from colonialism remain inviolate, which was absurd. The situation on the ground probably dictated that due to interstate conflicts. Soon after that, the OAU emerged as the most important trade union of “dictators” backed by their personal armies and militia. Consequently, the organisation was unable to sanction any of its members like the late Idi Amin, chairman of the OAU 1975, and Mobutu Seseko of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. This was because oppression of the African people by their governments became internal affairs in which dictatorships had “sovereignty”.

The international environment of a bitter cold war and the emergence of neo-colonialism also constrained the various groups from achieving total unity. Therefore, what mattered most then was whether regimes were pro-east or pro-west and not their Pan-Africanists credentials. The latter became victims of economic and political conspiracies as evidenced in the fate of Tom Mboya, Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah, Modibdo Keita, Abdel Nasser, Ben Bella and Sankara. Today, the African Union, although a lame duck, has managed to contain conflicts on the continent. However, conflicts in Somalia, Darfur and now Madagascar are some of its challenges.

As we celebrate 46 years of OAU, we have reason to look forward to the future with optimism. We pray that the current breed of leaders will continue respecting the African Union constitutive Act – the African Peer Review Mechanism. Our dream for continental unity is on course. I salute all those who strive to make this day a reality.

* The writer is a Pan Africanist

 

source.New Vision (Uganda), by Stephen Asiimwe

Congo-Kinshasa: Debate over truth commission – exposing truth surrounding crimes committed

 

Kinshasa (Congo DRC) — The search continues for the best way to expose the truth surrounding crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), not least in Ituri, in the north-east of the country, a region which where years of atrocities and massive human rights violations have gone unpunished.

Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) believe that impunity for these crimes could create a new focal point for dissent, leading to a possible violent backlash from the victims.

Gilbert Tandia, human rights activist and Congolese expert in conflict resolution, believes that “the launch of a forum similar to the ‘Amani’ process (Amani means” peace “in Swahili), launched in January 2008 for the restoration of peace in the two eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, would help local people live in greater harmony and foster local development.”

“Taking into account collective memory and the inadequacies of the Congolese justice system,” Tandia says, “(I believe that) in the absence of a Truth Commission, one must set up a mechanism which will help people to express themselves, giving truth its proper place.

“It would help people to freely discuss, as though in a family, those events in which they were the perpetrators or the victims, thus creating an atmosphere for reconciliation.”

This view is shared by Jean Claude Sady, activist in the Ituri Council of Faiths. “It would be good to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission tailor-made for Ituri, given that there is a need to know the truth about what was actually taking place over the years.”

¨Innocent Mayembe, a Congolese army major and president of the Ituri military court, is one of the few judicial figures supporting the proposal. “It is important to establish a platform of reconciliation that would involve all policymakers in Ituri in order to overcome the culture of mistrust.”

He stresses that this mistrust “creates potential for further confrontations.” But for Mayembe, “instead of the Amani process which has yet to yield results in over a year, a Truth Commission would be better, especially for crimes committed between 1998 and 2008 by local militias and troops from some of the DRC’s neighbouring countries.”

For example, between 1998 and 2001, Ituri suffered atrocities perpetrated by several militias, some of whose leaders are today before the International Criminal Court. These include Thomas Lubanga, president of the Union of Congolese Patriots which he founded in 2001, and Mathieu Ngudjolo, former leader of the Nationalists and Integrationists Front (FNI) and presently a colonel in the DRC army, as well as many others.

DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, has already decided what mechanism he will use in order to “answer the demands for justice made by victims of these abuses.” In an interview with the New York Times on Apr 4, Kabila said the DRC “will soon put justice first… and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) could come after …”

Recalling earlier failures of the TRC, Kabila said the DRC could not “undertake actions or initiatives which would take it back to where it was yesterday, or the day before yesterday.’

In fact, following the Inter-Congolese dialogue held in 2002 in South Africa – mediated by former South African president Nelson Mandela – the DRC set up a truth commission “whose outcome was a stinging failure,” according to Raphael Nyabirungu, professor of law and senior counsel to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

The DRC’s Truth Commission has been unable to open even a single case after three years of existence, according to Congolese civil society organisations.

Apart from Major Mayembe, another magistrate interviewed by IPS, Fidèle Sindan Kabamba, President of the Superior Court of Ituri, said that “the only mechanism capable of establishing the truth about crimes committed in Ituri is justice.”

For him, “one must first and foremost use the criminal justice system so that, through its ability to deter and intimidate, no person from any tribe – and there are 18 in Ituri – is responsible for any more killings and human rights violations.”

The problem surrounding the truth about Ituri thus remains. In their reports, several Congolese NGOs including “Justice Plus” and “Lotus Group”, based in Ituri, state that, “The Congolese justice system has no capacity to establish the truth because of its inadequacy.”

But President Kabila remains insistent, saying, “The Congolese justice system is independent and able to give answers to victims of crimes committed in Ituri.” He made the statement in the April interview with the U.S. daily in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.

 

source.Inter Press Service (IPS)

Nigeria: Thousands flee violence, hundreds suspected dead

 

Abuja (Nigeria) – Thousands of civilians have fled their villages in Nigeria’s Delta state after government troops launched an offensive against militant groups in the state on 13 May.

Villagers in Delta state’s Gbramatu kingdom reported Oporoza and Okerenkoko villages being attacked with heavy machine-gun fire from low-flying helicopters on 15 May. Eyewitness accounts reported at least 100 bodies, according to Amnesty International’s Nigeria campaigner Lucy Freeman.

The Nigerian Red Cross estimates that 1,000 displaced people have fled to Ogbe Ijoh – capital of Warri south government area – where they are sheltering in a primary school and hospital.

Witnesses report that about 3,000 people have fled and Amnesty International estimates that as many as 10,000 could be on the move.

Patricia Okolo from Okerenkoko told IRIN from Ogbe Ijoh: “I had to run from my home. I did not take a single item with me. I have 10 children but I don’t know where any of them are. I could not count the number of people who were killed or injured but there were many. I could not even count.”

“I don’t know where my husband is. I am the only one who got here.”

Most of the displaced are women and children as most men are too frightened of being attacked or killed, said Nigerian Red Cross officer Egbero Ococity from Ogbe Ijoh. Many men are hiding in the forest with no access to clean water, food or shelter, he said.

Joint Task Force troops, made up of the army, navy, air force and mobile police, launched an offensive on communities across Warri south and southwest government areas on 13 May after JTF troops were reported to have been attacked by armed groups in Delta state, according to Amnesty International.

In response, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), an umbrella group representing a number of militant factions, declared an “all-out war” in a 15 May press statement. The militant groups claim they are fighting for more local control of oil wealth in the impoverished region.

”I could not count the number of people who were killed or injured but there were many. I could not even count”
“Traumatised”

“Civilians are bearing the brunt of this violence. We are very concerned about bystanders who have been killed, injured or displaced,” said Amnesty’s Freeman.

Community members from targeted villages say military forces were searching for militants.

Some villagers told Amnesty International they were attacked while fleeing on boats – the only way to get away from the site of the violence. The delta is made up of a dense network of freshwater creeks, much of it accessible only by boat.

The Nigerian Red Cross’s disaster management coordinator, Attah Benson, told IRIN it was still too dangerous for NGOs to approach the affected area. “We are able to access only those who are on their way out.”

The Red Cross is working with the International Committee of the Red Cross, National Emergency Management Agency and other agencies to get food, water, blankets, utensils and hygiene kits to people in need, said Benson.

“They [the displaced] need food, water, shelter and blankets to relieve their suffering,” the Red Cross’s Ococity told IRIN. “They are sleeping on the bare floor. They are traumatised as a result of the attacks and what they went through in the mangroves while escaping.

“You can see the frustration in their faces. Hunger is taking its toll because most of them did not have anything to eat for four days.”

A local official said government troops have not attacked communities but have gone after what he called criminals. Col Rabe Abubakar, military spokesman in the Niger Delta, told IRIN: “Anybody who says we attacked a community let him come and show us which community we attacked. We are raiding, based on our information, the militants’ hideouts and arms dumps.”

He added: “The essence is to secure the region. We are not targeting any group or any community or individual. We are targeting criminals who carried out these heinous, uncivilised and barbaric attacks.”

The offensive suggests a “worrying change in direction” in the government’s approach, Freeman told IRIN. In recent months a government committee recommended amnesty for some politically-motivated militants.

In February 2009 the government of President Umaru Yar’Adua assured the UN Human Rights Council it would refrain from military offensives in the Delta region because of the risk of loss of innocent lives.

 

source.UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)