(Akiit.com) VATICAN CITY — African cardinals denounced the “cultural imperialism” of wealthy countries in their aid, trade and health care policies for Africa, saying Wednesday that the West’s promotion of abortion rights and condoms is destroying the continent’s moral fabric.

African prelates attending the three-week meeting on the role of the Catholic Church in Africa said their countries needed economic development partnerships that are based on trust and fairness, not ones that exploit Africa’s natural resources and put conditions on aid.

“We want to be helped, but helped in the name of truth, with respect of what we are and what we want for ourselves,” Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr of Dakar, Senegal, told a news conference.

He and Cardinal Wilfred Fox Napier of Durban, South Africa, denounced “hidden” agendas of international aid groups and countries that promote abortion rights and condoms to fight HIV, saying the West was trying to impose its views on Africa.
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(Akiit.com) CAPE COAST, Ghana — From the rampart of a whitewashed fort once used to ship countless slaves from Africa to the Americas, Cheryl Hardin gazed through watery eyes at the route forcibly taken across the sea by her ancestors centuries before.

“It never gets any easier,” the 48-year-old pediatrician said, wiping away tears on her fourth trip to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle in two decades. “It feels the same as when I first visited - painful, incomprehensible.”

On Saturday, Barack Obama and his family will follow in the footsteps of countless African-Americans who have tried to reconnect with their past on these shores. Though Obama was not descended from slaves - his father was Kenyan - he will carry the legacy of the African-American experience with him as America’s first black president.

For many, the trip will be steeped in symbolism.

“The world’s least powerful people were shipped off from here as slaves,” Hardin said Tuesday, looking past a row of cannons pointing toward the Atlantic Ocean. “Now Obama, an African-American, the most powerful person in the world, is going to be standing here. For us it will be a full-circle experience.”

Built in the 1600s, Cape Coast Castle served as Britain’s West Africa headquarters for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw European powers and African chiefs export millions in shackles to Europe and the Americas.

The slave trade ended here in 1833, and visitors can now trek through the fort’s dungeons, dark rooms once crammed with more than 1,000 men and women at a time who slept in their own excrement. The dank air inside still stings the eyes.

Visiting for the first time, Hardin’s 47-year-old sister Wanda Milian said the dungeons felt “like burial tombs.”

“It felt suffocating. It felt still,” said Milian, who like her sister lives in Houston, Texas. “I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t expect to experience the sense of loss, the sense of hopelessness and desolation.”

Those who rebelled were packed into similar rooms with hardly enough air to breath, left to die without food or water. Their faint scratch marks are still visible on walls.

Down by the shore is the fort’s so-called “Door of No Return,” the last glimpse of Africa the slaves would ever see before they were loaded into canoes that took them to ships that crossed the ocean.

Today, the door opens onto a different world: a gentle shore where boys freely kick a white soccer ball through the surf, where gray-bearded men sit in beached canoes fixing lime-green fishing nets, where women sell maize meal from plates on their heads.
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(Akiit.com) Inspired by actress Mia Farrow, members of Congress announced Tuesday that they were beginning a limited hunger strike to show solidarity with the people in Sudan’s Darfur region and demand President Barack Obama’s help in ending the suffering there.

“Among President Obama’s priorities, Darfur has to take its place,” Farrow, 64, told reporters on the Capitol campus, just after following her doctor’s orders and ending her own 12-day hunger strike.

More than a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus appeared alongside her to announce that they, too, were taking up the “Fast for Life” campaign - going a few days at a time consuming only water - through Congress’ adjournment in August.

Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa, said he had fasted last week for three days and said the group has requested a meeting with Obama.
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(Akiit.com) The news Americans hear about Africa these days is mostly bad – the periodic outbreak of violence, the worsening of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, runaway inflation in Zimbabwe, and the devastating impact of malaria and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In addition to the crises of the moment, Africans face structural challenges unlike those faced by any other continent in the world everyday – chronic food insecurity, unsafe and inadequate water, preventable childhood diseases, infant and maternal mortality, an alarming increase in the number of orphans and vulnerable children, inadequate schools, cycles of drought and flooding, civil war, the devastation of HIV/Aids, lack of basic infrastructure and social services, and grinding poverty.

It is no wonder that some people ask, “Is there any hope for Africa?”

Yes, there is reason for hope. There is another Africa, an emerging Africa, that belies the dire news of the day. The trends are truly encouraging.

According to the United Nations Economic Report on Africa, Africa overall has enjoyed sustained economic growth over the recent past. In 2006 Africa’s economies grew by more than five percent – their greatest expansion in eight years – and are projected to grow by seven percent this year, with Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania among the fastest-growing countries in the world. Across a broader comparison, Africa’s economic growth has surpassed the average economic growth of Latin America (4.3 percent).
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(Akiit.com) To mark the start of Black History Month, a calculation of what the continent lost…

We know much about 16th century sub-Saharan Africa from surviving remains, archaeological excavations and written sources. There were integrated kingdoms and empires, with substantial cities (60,000 to 140,000 inhabitants) and significant towns (1,000 to 10,000); and less organized territories with large scattered populations. People practised agriculture, stock-rearing, hunting, fishing and crafts (metalworking, textiles, ceramics). They navigated along rivers and across lakes, trading over short and long distances, using their own currencies.

In the 14th century the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta praised the security and justice of the Mali empire. Until the arrival of firearms, the Arab slave trade was insignificant in relation to economic activity and population. At the beginning of the 16th century, Leo Africanus noted in his Description of Africa that the king of Borno conducted only one slaving expedition a year.

Everything changed when the Portuguese reached the area south of the Congo River and conquered Angola. They attacked and destroyed the main ports on the east coast, and overran Mozambique. Firearms enabled the Moroccans to destroy the Songhai empire in just nine years. Thousands were killed, or captured and reduced to slavery. The victors carried off men, animals, goods, precious objects.

Kingdoms and empires fragmented into principalities, which were forced to wage war to capture prisoners who could be traded for the rifles necessary for defence and attack. The resulting population movements provoked further confrontations, with refugee settlements, and the spread of a state of latent war to the heart of the continent. The number of raids increased: The Tunisian writer Muhammad al-Tunsy, who travelled to Darfur and Ouaddai (in modern Chad) at the beginning of the 19th century, reported that in the northeast of the Central African Republic they had reached 80 a year.

The social, economic, political and administrative fabric was damaged, then destroyed. Many people were forced to fend for themselves in defensive positions where food and water were hard to get. Living standards fell. The fate of those taken into slavery worsened. A parasitic social class of collaborators emerged: brokers, warders, caravaneers, interpreters and suppliers of provisions.

At first, rulers gave up only prisoners under sentence of death. But the Portuguese wanted more, and took them by force. Every year from 1575 to 1580, Paulo Dias de Novais, the first captain-governor of Angola, sent off an average of 12,000 captives.

Throughout the 17th and the 18th centuries, most European ship-owners participated in this profitable business. By the second half of the 18th century the numbers involved were enormous; excluding periods when England and France were at war, hundreds of ships transported more than 150,000 every year. The prevalent state of insecurity across much of Africa caused famine and encouraged indigenous and imported diseases, especially smallpox. As these became endemic, epidemics spread.

Africans were killed in raids or during the journey from the interior to the coast. They committed suicide or died resisting embarkation. They died because the disruption of existing political entities provoked further raids and internal wars. They died as populations fled from greedy slavers. They died of disease, and of hunger when their crops and supplies were destroyed. They were also killed by firearms, bad liquor, declining hygiene and the loss of inherited knowledge.
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