10 October 2021
Mali: A Colombian nun, taken hostage in 2017 in Koutiala close to the Burkinabè border, has been freed and seems to be in good health. It is not known whether a ransom was paid. At least 935 people have been abducted in Mali since 2017. The government says efforts are under way to get all those still being held released.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-58859526
Congo-Kinshasa: Islamists are reported to have kidnapped farmers in the Beni area in North Kivu and occupied a church. “The militants have been active in the forests of Mutweyi and Kalalangwe in the past month, invading villages.” People have fled.
BBC Africa 10 October 2021. 11:23
09 October 2021
Uganda: Between 2012 and 2015, police has removed villagers in Kijayo region (western Uganda) from their homes by police “at the behest of the company Hoima Sugar Ltd.” – the company says “it bought the land for use as a plantation and (…) paid 142 families between £6 ($8) and £3,900”. In 2013, “398 families began legal proceedings against the firm” to fight their eviction. Since 2017, a UK project provided legal support and trained women for them to have new sources of income. But this aid will end at the end of 2021 and with the case in court not advancing (“(a) legal judgement deciding who owns the land is yet to be made as the judge allocated to the case keeps changing”), the women are afraid of not being strong enough to go on fighting on their own.
BBC Africa 09 October 2021. Latest Updates. 8:07
Somalia/Literature: A portrait of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel the Fortune Men. She was born in Italy to an Italian mother and a Somali father, grew up in Mogadishu, fled from increasing violence in 1991 at the age of 18, to Italy first and now lives in Belgium. She writes most of all about and for women. Preoccupied by the question, how one roots oneself again when everything you know has gone, she rooted herself by writing – untypically. Literature is traditionally reserved to men in Somali society.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-58845340