at 1/16/2015

#FridayFeature: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’

Ellen Johnson was born in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, amongst the descendents of original colonists of Liberia (ex-African slaves from America, who promptly on arrival set about enslaving the indigenous people using the social system of their old American masters as a basis for their new society). These descendents are known in Liberia as Americo-Liberians.

The social inequalities between indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians has lead to much of the political and social strife in the country, as leadership bounced between dictators representing opposing groups (Samuel Doe replacing William Tolbert, Charles Taylor replacing Samuel Doe). Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf rejects the suggestion that she is one of the elite: "If such a class existed, it has been obliterated over the last few years from intermarriages and social integration."

Gaining an Education
From 1948 to 55 Ellen Johnson studied accounts and economics at the College of West Africa in Monrovia. After marriage at the age of 17 to James Sirleaf, she travelled to America (in 1961) and continued her studies, achieving a degree from the University of Colorado. From 1969 to 71 she read economics at Harvard, gaining a masters degree in public administration. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf then returned to Liberia and began working in William Tolbert's (True Whig Party) government.

A Start in Politics
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf served as Minister of Finance from 1972 to 73, but left after a disagreement over public spending. As the 70s progressed, life under Liberia's one-party state became more polarised - to the benefit of the Americo-Liberian elite. On 12 April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Kayon Doe, a member of the indigenous Krahn ethnic group, seized power in a military coup and President William Tolbert was executed along with several members of his cabinet by firing squad.

Life under Samuel Doe
With the People's Redemption Council now in power, Samuel Doe began a purge of government. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf narrowly escaped - choosing exile in Kenya. From 1983 to 85 she served as Director of Citibank in Nairobi, but when Samuel Doe declared himself president of the Republic in 1984 and unbanned political parties, she decided to return. During the 1985 elections Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf campaigned against Doe, and was placed under house arrest.

An Economist's Life in Exile
Sentenced to ten years in prison, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf spent just a short time incarcerated, before being allowed to leave the country once again as an exile. During the 1980s she served as Vice President of both the African Regional Office of Citibank, in Nairobi, and of (HSCB) Equator Bank, in Washington. Back in Liberia civil unrest erupted once more. On 9 September 1990, Samuel Doe was killed by a splinter group from Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

A New Regime
From 1992 to 97 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf worked as Assistant Administrator, and then Director, of the UN Development Program Regional Bureau for Africa (essentially an Assistant Secretary-General of the UN). Meanwhile in Liberia an interim government was put in power, lead by a succession of four un-elected officials (the last of whom, Ruth Sando Perry, was Africa's first female leader). By 1996 the presence of West African peacekeepers created a lull in the civil war, and elections were held.

A First Attempt at the Presidency
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1997 to contest the election. She came second to Charles Taylor (gaining 10% of the vote compared to his 75%) out of a field of 14 candidates. The election was declared free and fair by international observers. (Johnson-Sirleaf campaigned against Taylor and was charged with treason.) By 1999 civil war had returned to Liberia, and Taylor was accused of interfering with his neighbours, fomenting unrest and rebellion.

A New Hope from Liberia
On 11 August 2003, after much persuasion, Charles Taylor handed power over to his deputy Moses Blah. The new interim government and rebel groups signed an historic peace accord and set about installing a new head of state. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was proposed as a possible candidate, but in the end the diverse groups selected Charles Gyude Bryant, a political neutral. Johnson-Sirleaf served as head of the Governance Reform Commission.

Liberia's 2005 Election
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf played an active role in the transitional government as the country prepared for the 2005 elections, and eventually stood for president against her rival the ex-international footballer, George Manneh Weah. Despite the elections being called fair and orderly, Weah repudiated the result, which gave a majority to Johnson-Sirleaf, and the announcement of Liberia's new president was postponed, pending an investigation. On 23 November 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was declared the winner of the Liberian election and confirmed as the country's next president. Her inauguration, attended by the likes of US First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, took place on Monday 16 January, 2006.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, divorced mother of four boys and grandmother to six children is Liberia's first elected female president, as well as the first elected female leader on the continent.

*Article sourced from: http://africanhistory.about.com/od/liberia/p/Sirleaf.htm

#FridayFeature: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’ Ellen Johnson was born in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, amongst t...

at 1/09/2015

Friday Feature: Ahmed Sékou Touré

Independence Leader & First President of Guinea

Ahmed Sékou Touré (9th January 1922 - 26 March 1984), first president of the Republic of Guinea (1958–84) and a leading African politician.

Although his parents were poor and uneducated, Touré claimed to be the grandson of Samory, a military leader who resisted French rule at the end of the 19th century, long after many other Africans had surrendered. Reared as a Muslim, Touré attended a French technical school at Conakry, from which he was expelled after one year for leading a food riot (1936). In 1940 Touré was hired as a clerk by a business firm, the Niger Français, and the following year took an administrative assignment in the postal service. There he developed a strong interest in the labour movement and organized the first successful strike, lasting 76 days, in French West Africa. In 1945 he became secretary-general of the Post and Telecommunications Workers’ Union and helped to found the
Federation of Workers’ Unions of Guinea, linked to the World Federation of Trade Unions, of which he later became vice president.

King Samory Toure

Touré became active in politics in the mid-1940s and in 1946 helped Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) form the African Democratic Rally. Touré proved to be a powerful orator and was elected to the French National Assembly in 1951 as a representative from Guinea, but he was not allowed to take his seat. Reelected in 1954, he was again barred. After being elected mayor of Conakry by a large majority in 1955, he was finally permitted to take his place in the National Assembly the following year. By the end of 1957 Touré had become vice president of the Executive Council of Guinea.

When French President Charles de Gaulle in 1958 offered French territories a referendum on whether to join a new federal community or to become independent, Touré and the Democratic Party of Guinea–African Democratic Rally led a successful campaign for independence. Guinea’s voting population overwhelmingly rejected de Gaulle’s offer and instead chose complete independence; Guinea was the only French colony in Africa that did not accept the proposal. On October 2, 1958, Guinea became the first independent French-speaking state in Africa, and shortly afterward Touré was elected its president. The French reacted by recalling all their professional people and civil servants and by removing all transportable equipment. Threatened by an economic breakdown, Touré accepted support from the communist bloc and at the same time sought help from Western nations.

In African affairs Touré was an ardent supporter of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and his program for African political unity, but a union of the two nations proclaimed in 1958 never became effective. When Nkrumah was deposed in 1966, Touré granted him asylum. After an unsuccessful invasion from neighbouring Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) in 1971, he undertook a political purge and imposed severe restrictions on opposition forces in his country. He was re-elected without opposition in subsequent elections and ruled with an iron hand.

Touré was viewed in international politics as a moderate African Islamic leader. In 1982 he led the delegation sent by the Islāmic Conference Organization to mediate in the Iran-Iraq War; he also was a member in the Pan-Africanist Organization for African Unity (OAU).

Article sourced from: http://africanhistory.about.com/od/panafricanists/a/Bio-SekouToure.htm

Friday Feature: Ahmed Sékou Touré Independence Leader & First President of Guinea Ahmed Sékou Touré (9th January 1922 - 26 M...

at 11/14/2014

Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France in the 1930s. Its founders included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas. The word négritude derives from the French word "Nègre" and literally means "negro-ness."

The Négritude writers found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection of French colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora was the best tool in fighting against French political and intellectual hegemony and domination. They formed a realistic literary style and formulated their Marxist ideas as part of this movement.

Negritude responded to the alienated position of blacks in history. The movement asserted an identity for black people around the world that was their own. For Césaire and Damas, from Martinique and French Guiana, the rupture from Africa through the Atlantic Slave Trade was a great part of their cultural understanding. Their work told of the frustration and loss of their motherland. For Senegalese Senghor, his works focused more on African traditionalism. In ways the assertion of each poet diverges from each other, but the combination of different perspectives is also what fueled and fed Negritude. From a political standpoint, Negritude was an important aspect to the rejection of colonialism. Emerging at the cusp of African independence movements, Negritude made an impact on how the colonized viewed themselves. It also sparked and fed off of subsequent literary movements that were responding to global politics.

The term négritude (which most closely means "blackness" in English) then was first used in 1935 by Aimé Césaire, in the third issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noiralso contains Césaire's first published work, "Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale" under the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Negreries," which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its reclamation of the word "nègre" as a positive term. "Nègre" previously had been almost exclusively used in a pejorative sense, much like the English word "nigger". Césaire deliberately and proudly incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his movement.

Poet and the later first president of Sénégal, Senghor used la Négritude to work toward a universal valuation of African people. He advocated a modern incorporation of the expression and celebration of traditional African customs and ideas. This interpretation of la Négritude tended to be the most common, particularly in later years.

There is no clear end date to the movement, and some literary critics say that it still continues today, in any artistic expression asserting black identity.

This information was accessed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A9gritude on 14 November 2014.

Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France in the...

at 10/31/2014

Hugh Masekela Delivers the Lecture at LSE

Diamond Biko

By Hugh Masekela

Bantu Biko’s life was yanked from us as brutally as was that of Lumumba, of Sobukwe, of Makana, of the Mxenges, of Sharpeville, of the children of 1976 and millions of people of the continent of Africa for whom there is nary a plague anywhere.

But Bantu Biko’s ideals, his dream refuses to fade, his legacy says “no” to the death sentence through constant torture and assault that was suffered upon his being.The time is indeed emerging again, where African people will strive to revive the constant visibility of their heritage. We will create academies where we will be enabled once more to learn our languages, where We will be taught the songs of out great-great-great-great grandparents, where we will play the drums, the mbiras, the marimbas, the Balotons, the Ouds, the shakers, the Koras, the bells, the violins, the tam-tams and the talking drums of our ancestors, dancing to the choreography they have sculpted us for. We will build academies where our remaining aged will come and recite for us their oral proficiencies withdrawn from the banks of their very lasting recalls of where our roots are still blooming.

We will build establishments where today’s old and new generations will go and learn of the Songhay empire, the Mali empire, the Ghana empire, Maphungubwe, Monomotapa, Mozambikhe, Khoi-San, Ituri, Dogon, Ashanti, Maasai, Peul, Igbo, Maninka, Nama, The Nile, the Zambezi, the Kalahari, the Congo, the history of Africa according to Africa.

We will build monuments for those who were massacred during the Atlantic crossings of slavery, those who were murdered for refusing to go West by force, for those who jumped overboard rather than land in New Orleans, South Carolina, Mississippi, Caribbean, Brazilian, South American, European slave markets. We will fashion conservatories wherein we shall bring back Louis Armstrong, King Olivier, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Duke, Count, Ella, Sarah, Billie, Bird, Miles, Etta, Marvin, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Miriam Makeba, Franco, Fela, Ebenezer, Obeyi, Zakes Nkosi, Dorothy Masuku, Victor Ndlazilwane, The Manhattan Brothers, The Dark City Sisters, Lemmie Mabaso, Spokes Mashiyane, Dolly Rathebe, Ntemi Piliso, Samba, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Demba, Tabu Ley, Dumisani Maraire, Chiwoniso Lucky Dube, Kippie Moeketsi, Alan Silingan, Alpheus Nkosi, Kandia, Salif, Youssou and all the gods of our music.

We will construct institutions where we will learn again our praise-poetry, where we will reclaim our names where the teaching of our ancient design, culture, cuisine, artisanship, sculptures, furniture, household goods, arts and crafts will be as accessible as iPads, computers, cell phones, apps, iPods television, radio and glossy magazines, where our presence on the aforementioned screens will be more frequent than the daily news, the wigs, the extensions, the skin lighteners and the urbanisation, and brainwashing of our psyches. We will be as visible as Victorian Falls, the Sahara, the Namibian Dunes, the Serengeti Plains, the Big Five and Kruger National Park. We will construct Museums where our art treasure will be in view, where our stolen artifact adorning European, Western and Asian Museums will tour the exhibition halls of our academies of heritage restoration. The world will sieve to fear the return of a universal Africa spanning the whole wide world and ushering in an era where our future generations will not say; “It is rumored that there used to be Africans long ago.”

We will not abandon the pursuit of learning about other cultures, albeit without mimicking or imitating them but we will have our own heritage as a mirror against them totally consuming us to the point that we conceive our own as savage, heathen, pagan, backward, barbaric or primitive. Yes!! We will zip up our boots and go back to our roots. We will be our original selves again where we will return to our own frontiers which were in place before the European invasion and colonisation.

It is then that we will cease to be manipulated into going into war over frontiers and countries that were decided through courtesy of the Kaiser of Germany in 1886. We shall let the world finally realise that who we are is not only harmless, but beautiful, educational and very civilising. That our society possesses the most diverse cross-section of cultural content in the world and that the time for its restoration is now, that its time has come. That is not to be feared for it is not a threat but a major asset to the possibility, the possibility of humanity being re-civilised back into an environment of peace and harmony. We shall achieve this dream, which Bantu Biko was crucified for and when we do, Bantu Biko will be smiling where he is, singing, dancing and living in us, with us for Africa.

This was the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, Europe, delivery by Mr. Hugh Masekela on 28 October 2014 at the London School of Economics.

Hugh Masekela Delivers the Lecture at LSE Diamond Biko By Hugh Masekela Bantu Biko’s life was yanked from us as brutally as was ...

at 10/24/2014

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#FridayFeature: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

Friday Feature: Ahmed Sékou Touré

Independence Leader & First President of Guinea

Ahmed Sékou Touré (9th January 1922 - 26 March 1984), first president of the Republic of Guinea (1958–84) and a leading African politician.

Friday Feature: The Negritude Movement

Friday Feature: 3rd Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, Europe

Diamond Biko

Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, Europe, 2014