TAN – The Afro News

The market woman in Togo

By Nils Kalbfuss, The Afro News Togo : My name is Nils or Koffi in the local language Ewe. I am from Germany and currently participating in a voluntary service in the small, almost-unknown but marvellous West African country Togo. In recent days we were preparing a big birthday party for me which is really different to the ones I am accustomed to. Read the full story

Who is Black ?

Who Is Black?  “Who Is Black?” this question was a sub-theme that ran throughout “As The Spirit Moves: Connecting Through Art and Conversations” on February 20th at the SFU downtown campus. It arose when I met 101 year-old Rose Landers (The Afro News, April 2011). To a casual observer Rose is black but in her own mind and under the racial distinctions of South Africa she is coloured because some of her ancestors were white. In the United States she would be regarded as black because some of her ancestors were black. Read the full story

Remarkable Rose Landers with her granddaughter, Marion

When I met Rose Landers at As the Spirit Moves: Connecting Through Art and Conversations, a National Congress of Black Women Event at the downtown campus of SFU on February 20, she was 101 years and three weeks old. She was born on February 1, 1910 in Cape Town, South Africa, right by Table Mountain. To all appearances Rose could be Desmond Tutu’s mother. Read the full story

Martin-Luther-King

This Black History Month event is about education youth of all colour in the Lower Mainland about the historical impacts blacks have made in Canada, North America and beyond. The education system in the Lower Mainland at most schools does not offer enough education to its students during the month of February on Black History Month from my personal experiences. In additions, depending on where an individual lives she or he might not come into contact with professional lawyers, teachers, musicians, filmmakers, counsellors etc of African or Caribbean heritage. Read the full story

TAN - Networks The Afro News Joy OH Joyeux !

The hope of building a better future occupies many individuals, families and even companies at the new year often starts with taking stock of the past.

Remember. Adapt. Change. Heal. Progress. Below, a possibility for our potential shared by TAN’s U.S.A. contributor, Frank T. Scruggs.

The Afro News respectfully introduces this piece and asks readers to consider its content across time, as well as across the waters. We continue to remember the incredible upheavals and to look forward to the rebuilding of Haiti as one of the key pieces in the matrix of both the Afric world and the global context. Read the full story

Ghanaian/African culture for progress

Comment/Ghana/Africa   :  It was the German thinker Karl Max who observed that the human mind is linked by invisible thread. Marx could be interpreted in many ways but the sense here is how rapid the Ghanaian enlightenment movement is briskly spreading among Ghanaian elites, both at home and in the diaspora. Read the full story

The Miyanda Drum & Dance Group

By Ariadne Sawyer, MA, Afro news reporter.

From Mexico to Scotland and many places in between; an exciting young dance group of girls have delighted and entertained audiences in many places in British Columbia and in other countries. In the future, their dream is to perform in Africa.

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Battling Child Witchcraft Accusation

Development/Philosophy/Africa

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong :The flowering of The African Century, as a material progress scheme, is also an enlightenment struggle. Most African elites have not thought about this despite their cultural obstacles wheeling around them that have asphyxiated their greater progress. And this means The African Century also embraces a critical look at the African culture that is expected to drive The African Century.

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Universal Education

By Frank T. Scruggs The Afro News International

Many times African-blooded people around the world seek self-determination, to acquire political power and improve their socio-economic status. The first step in achieving these goals is to embrace education and knowledge. Far too many African people around the world have ignored the importance of formal education. Education has long been the road to enlightenment and freedom. Education awakens one to exploitation, oppression and the subtleties of racism and white privilege.

Oftentimes there is a sense of comfort and bliss within certain levels of ignorance and often those whom elevate their minds cannot all of a sudden reveal the depth of knowledge they possess due to the backlash from others. In the centuries old book, Plato’s Republic, the philosopher described an imaginary situation of people bound underground in a dark cavern. In this cavern their only view of the world was one of the shadows puppets and carved figures that flickered from a fire. One of the bound people freed himself from this bondage and climbed out the cavern into the world outside the cavern. He then saw the real world and went back to tell his bound comrades what he saw of the real world. They thought him mad, attacked him and placed him back into bondage. When some of us have freed our minds and leave others bound an intolerable situation is created and much conflict is created. Education and enlightenment therefore must be available to all.

We cannot expect to lead and seek to control our own destinies without education and knowledge. We must understand technology, industry, science and our own history to move forward. Obtaining a degree is more than reading a thousand books or parroting some instructor’s lecture; it is more about critical thinking, raising one’s skill level and advancing within the arts and sciences. Education is the foundation of nation-building and enhancing one’s culture. Education provides the freedom and social imagination necessary to create a lasting, endurable people and collective spirit. Education provides the mechanism needed to create leaders and informed followers.

Education becomes a first step in the creation an international, cross-cultural agenda designed to bring unity throughout the African Diaspora. Reaching one’s full potential becomes a true possibility when people can learn about their own identity and are allowed to acquire technical and philosophical skills that are consistent with their own aptitudes. Education is not just a want but is a necessity that African people everywhere need to demand and aggressively seek.

President Mamadou Tandja,

Commentary/Niger/Africa

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong The Afro News International

The February 18 overthrow of Niger’s President Mamadou Tandja, 71, reveals whether African leaders think deeply about their societies, especially if their thinking is solidly informed by their histories and the values that wheel them. You don’t need to be a guru or part of the breathless African commentary talks to observe that Tandja was heading Niger towards self-destruction.

Stop me if you’ve heard this in the last couple of days: Tandja held a referendum to abolish limits on presidential terms of office, disregarded the Supreme Court’s decision against extension of the two term presidential limits, abolished parliament, and concentrated immense powers on himself, in a near-totalitarian streak.

In all the rush to install himself as the monarch of all that survey, Tandja cleverly used Niger’s democratic tenets, as Kwame Nkrumah, Samuel Doe, among others, had done, putting Niger on perpetual edge. That Tandja has been suffering from the much dreaded African Big Man syndrome that made him blinded from the Nigerien and African reality is incontestable. What is instructive is that in Tandja, despite his advanced age, African leaders have not learned from their histories and cultures, and the emerging democratic order that pins progress on democracy, freedoms, human rights and the rule of law.

No doubt, while Africans, who have suffered under totalitarian rulers of the likes of Idi Amin and Jean-Bedel Bokassa, abhor military and one-party regimes, the new Niger military junta’s name of Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy and their initial promise to turn Niger into an example of “democracy and good governance” and save its people from “poverty, deception and corruption,” reveals how democracy as solution to Africa’s development challenges is gradually sinking in as a progress vehicle, thus making the Indian welfare economist Amartya Kumar Sen’s “development in freedom” an African mantra.

Against this background, Tandja’s muddled thinking reveals that contemporary African progress challenges isn’t one of the ills of the often beat-up European colonialism but African elites’ lack of comprehension of themselves and Africa’s progress challenges.

By nature prone to autocracy, Tandja couldn’t coherently evaluate Niger’s history as yardstick to enrich Niger’s progress informed by the growing African democracy and freedoms trends. Tandja was mired in the African traditional superstitious belief that he is the only one chosen by God to rule Niger in a country of immense poverty where 61 percent live on less than US$1 a day and stuck in disturbing record of coups, assassinations and on-and-off rebellion by its nomadic Tuareg group.

How does Africans fathom the fact that Tandja believes that he is the only one, out of the 14 million Nigeriens, that can “complete major investment projects” in Niger? His silly believes, floated by juju-marabout spiritual mediums who buzz around him, come from the African traditional superstitious belief that he is God sent. It is such ridiculous believes that make the African Big Man looks down on their citizenry no matter their material concerns that saw the likes of dictatorial Idi Amin blow their countries into pieces.

Prof. A.K.P. Kludze, former Justice of Ghana’s Supreme Court, talks of how though President Kwame Nkrumah was a freedom fighter and a committed Pan-Africanist, he later allowed the unrestrained Big Man syndrome to turn Ghana into a one-party state at his time, becoming the live chairman of his ruling Conventions People’s Party and the general secretary of the party’s Central Committee. “Nobody dared challenge him because it was considered treasonous to challenge him. He made a law that said that nobody could stand as a candidate unless his candidature was approved by the General Secretary of the party, that is he himself.”

Tandja was an example of Big Man syndrome, scheming to rule for life against the multi-ethnic make-up of Niger that will be enriched better with healthy democracy and freedoms. But Tandja can’t let go the Big Man syndrome. Tandja believes he is the only man destined by God to rule Niger. Tandja is a throwback to Africa’s period of paranoid one-party systems and military juntas that darkened most part of post-independent Africa.

Tandja had his first taste of power after a 1974 coup. As a symptom of the Big Man syndrome, Tandja’s geocentricisms became oblivious to criticism from Africa and the international community. Tandja overturned the country’s infant democracy (since 1999) by cleverly appropriating its democratic tenets to create a domineering President-for-Life system a la Kwame Nkrumah. The psychology informing Tandja’s thinking is a page from the unelected Jerry Rawlings telling Ghanaians “To whom,” when asked to hand over power in the 1980s and give way to democracy.

In Sierra Leone, President Siaka Stevens told Sierra Leoneans, “Pass I die” (Till I die I remain President no matter what) when asked to democratize against the realities on the ground. Stevens prepared the grounds for Sierra Leone’s eventual explosion. In Liberia, as Samuel Doe messed-up the democratic system in an atmosphere of extreme autocracy, he and his cronies shouted, “No Doe, No Liberia.” Doe ended up blowing Liberia into pieces. Generally, Africa’s long gone “President-for-Life” culture reveals that the Big Man looks down on the citizenry, believing they are God chosen against the democratic and development aspirations of the masses, damning the consequences.

But Tandja wasn’t positively tapping into current African development thinking. “No Tandja, No Niger,” Tandja indirectly tells Nigeriens and Africans. What is the antidote to Niger’s development challenges, the Big Man syndrome and in dealing with the likes of Tandja? Not military coups but education, the rule of law, human rights, freedoms, democracy and “teachable moments” of African current events. And what lawyers call an admission against interest: the best way to understand Niger is to get to the bottom of its painful events and that’s to start reading its history.