25 May 2021
Sudan: After “ethnic clashes” in the Red Sea coastal city of Port Sudan causing at least 5 dead and 13 injured, a state of emergency and a night curfew have been declared.
BBC Africa Live 25 May 2021. 5:08
Egypt: Five years ago, Giulio Regeni was tortured and murdered in Cairo. Italian prosecutors now want four members of the Egyptian security forces on trial. As it is extremely unlikely that they will be sent to Italy, they’ll be tried in absentia. The trial will “focus much international attention on what can go on in Egyptian detention centres, where human rights activists say there is the systematic use of torture.”
BBC Africa Live 25 May 2021. 10:58
Mali: The transition Vice-President Colonel Assimi Goita said he has “removed the president and prime minister because they violated the terms of the transition by not consulting him on cabinet changes”.
BBC Africa Live 25 May 2021. 12:06
Zimbabwe: During Africa Day commemorations, the country’s president has unveiled a statue of Charwe Nyakasikana aka Mbuya Nehanda on a footbridge in central Harare, “a spirit medium who mobilised the fight against colonialism before her capture and execution by Cecil John Rhodes’s British South African Company administration in 1898.”
BBC Africa Live 25 May 2021. 13:43
24 May 2021
Ethiopia: Because of the Tigray conflict, the US imposes “wide-ranging restrictions on economic and security assistance to Ethiopia”. There’ll also be “visa restrictions on Ethiopian and Eritrean officials and others who are accused of atrocities.”
BBC Africa Live 24 May 2021. 4:32
Enslavement: No longer a “slave”, but an “enslaved person”, no longer “slavery”, but “enslavement”. To label someone a “slave” emphasizes his or her “thinghood”, rendering personal attributes apart from being owned invisible. Barry Jenkins, the director of the series “The Underground Railroad”, wants to take it further: the term “enslavement” “takes the onus off of who they were and places it on what was done to them. And I want to get to what they did.” About himself, Jenkins says “that ‘before making this show … I would have said I’m the descendant of enslaved Africans. I think now that answer has evolved (…) ‘I am the descendant of blacksmiths and midwives and herbalists and spiritualists’.”
https://theconversation.com/the-underground-railroad-attempts-to-upend-viewers-notions-of-what-it-meant-to-be-enslaved-160855
Zambia: The lawyer John Sangwa is challenging Edgar Lungu’s right to try for re-election, arguing that he has already served two terms – the first when he completed Michael Sata’s term after his death in 2014. Seems that, “in 2008, after Zambia's former President Levy Mwanawasa died in office, his successor Rupiah Banda’s continuation was considered as his first term.”
BBC Africa Live 24 May 2021. 9:05