Angola registered, in the last 24 hours, 55 new cases, 17 recovered patients and one death.
According to the clinical bulletin, of the new cases 38 were diagnosed in Luanda, 5 in Huíla, 5 in Zarie, 5 in Cabinda, 1 in Bié and 1 in Cuando Cubango.
Among the new patients, whose ages range from 10 months to 73 years, 32 are men and 23 women.
The death, according to the report, was registered in Luanda province, involving an 83-year-old Angolan citizen.
Of those recovered, 10 reside in Luanda, four in Uige, two in Bié and one in Huíla.
The country has 20,695 positive cases, with 502 deaths, 19,238 recovered and 955 active.
Of the active cases, one is critical, 10 severe, 25 moderate, 24 mild and 895 asymptomatic.
The laboratories processed 1,013 samples.
In the country's treatment centres, 60 patients are hospitalised, while in institutional quarantine centres there are 44 people.
The authorities have 1,598 contacts of positive cases under surveillance.
Applications for the next Apple Entrepreneur Camp for Female* Founders and Developers are now open.
Eligibility
Applications are accepted from developers worldwide. To be eligible to apply:
Your organization must have:
A female founder, cofounder, or CEO;
A female developer proficient in Swift or Objective-C; and
A developed app or functional build that you can demo live.
You must be 18 years of age or older and proficient in English.
The female founder, cofounder, or CEO, the female developer, and additional developer or designer of any gender (if applicable) must be 18 years of age or older, proficient in English, and able to attend together for the entire duration of the program.
Benefits
Apple Entrepreneur Camp consists of an immersive technology lab, as well as mentorship, education, and support. Selected organizations receive the following free of charge:
One-on-one code-level guidance from Apple engineers
Ongoing support from an Apple Developer representative for at least one year
One year of membership in the Apple Developer Program
Access to the Apple Entrepreneur Camp alumni network, a world-class group of inspiring and ambitious leaders
Each year, the WISE Edtech Accelerator selects innovative ventures with high potential for scalability and positive impact.
Application Deadline: April 23, 2021
The WISE Accelerator supports innovative initiatives developing solutions in education technology with high potential for scalability and positive impact. Each year, the selected initiatives join the one-year program, during which they benefit from tailor-made support to address challenges that hinder their growth and scaling up process.
For over six years, we have supported founders from around the world build and scale innovative edtech solutions. With the support of our community of edtech founders, investors and education stakeholders, we have delivered a bespoke program aimed at providing access to quality mentorship, coaching and a global network focused on changing the way we learn, teach and work
Benefits
Global Network
Access a community of over 50 edtech founders from 18 countries
Interaction with industry leaders from the private sector, non-profit organisations and government
Networking opportunities with potential donors, investors and partners
Coaching & Mentorship
A hand-picked team of experts providing founders with support on:
Marketing, sales & fundraising
Product strategy, development and roadmapping
Market insights and positioning
International Visibility
Selected ventures will have the opportunity to attend our international events and promotion on our global platforms including:
WISE@ forums, previous editions were held in Paris, New York and Beijing
WISE social media platforms
WISE Summit in Doha, convening over 4000 attendees from 100 countries
adidas SA x Red & Yellow Creative Business School partner to offer two lucky students an opportunity to study 1-year courses in an Advanced Diploma in Marketing & Advertising Communications and a Higher Certificate in Digital Content.
adidas SA x Red are calling all students looking to further their studies an opportunity to enter and stand a chance of winning a one-year course in the following programs:
1-year Advanced Diploma: Marketing & Advertising Communications– (NQF 7) for students looking to further their studies after completing a bachelor’s degree.
1-year Higher Certificate: Digital Content– (NQF 5) for students looking to further their studies after completing Matric.
The bursary includes the following benefits in assisting students to a comfortable transition:
adidas Mentorship
Supply of adidas product
Monthly stipend towards transport, books, and other costs
Laptop provided by Red & Yellow Creative Business School
Are you a changemaker who wants to become part of a network of progressive business leaders? Join the Swedish Institute Management Programme Africa to lead change for responsible leadership and sustainable business practices.
The Swedish Institute Management Programme (SIMP) brings together business leaders who want to succeed in driving change for economically, environmentally and socially sustainable businesses.
SIMP Africa 2021 runs online and at conference venues* in the respective capital cities between June 2021 – February 2022. The programme contains coaching, interactive workshops, group tasks and lectures, as well as virtual visits to companies and organisations in Sweden. SIMP is a challenging and interactive programme that demands your active participation and contribution. It is not a series of one-way communicated lectures.
Benefits
An exclusive suite of workshops, lectures and visits with highly-acclaimed speakers selected specifically for their competence, clarity, and high level of audience engagement.
A thorough understanding of the principles of sustainable business with a focus on human rights, climate and the environment, decent working conditions and anti-corruption.
A strong set of skills to drive change in your own organisation through responsible leadership.
Knowledge to let you work with Design Thinking as a method to develop creative and sustainable solutions to complex problems.
A network of leaders who are committed to sustainable business and responsible leadership with whom you will grow and learn from to build lasting business relationships.
8th Continental Essay Competition for the year 2021
Theme: “The role of Standardisation in promoting Arts, Culture and Heritage – The Creative Economy in Africa”
University and College Students under the age of 35 years eligible to participate
The Competition aims to have 3 categories of winners: the National, Regional and Continental. In this regard, ARSO is requesting all the National Standards Bodies (NSBs) in Africa to organise the competition at the National level and send out the attached documents (8th Continental Essay Concept Paper and Registration Form) to the various Universities /Colleges for the competition. The NSB is expected to conduct the competition at the National level. This entails sending out the relevant documents to Colleges/ Universities, receiving the essays from the participants, doing the assessment and awarding or giving recognition to the winners as appropriate to the NSB.
The organizers are inviting students in institutions of higher learning in Africa (Colleges/ Universities approved by their local commission of higher education) to submit their essays on the theme: “The role of Standardisation in promoting Arts, Culture and Heritage – The Creative Economy in Africa.” to their respective National Standards Bodies (NSBs) email addresses. (Confirm with your respective NSBs on the submission dates)
Victims say they have come up against the police’s repeated refusal to investigate complaints against Hindu rioters.
The shooter shouted “Victory to Lord Ram,” the Hindu god, before pulling the trigger that sent a bullet into Muhammad Nasir Khan’s left eye.
Khan put a trembling hand on his bloody eye socket and his fingers slipped deep into the wound. At that moment, he was sure he would die.
Khan ended up surviving the violence that killed 53 others, mostly fellow Muslims, when it engulfed his neighbourhood in the Indian capital last year – India’s worst communal riots in decades.
The 35-year-old is still shaken and his attacker still unpunished. Khan says he has been unable to get justice due to a lack of police interest in his case.
“My only crime is that my name identifies my religion,” Khan said at his home in New Delhi’s North Ghonda neighbourhood.
Many of the Muslim victims of last year’s bloody violence say they have come repeatedly up against a refusal by police to investigate complaints against Hindu rioters.
Some still hope the courts will come to their aid, while others believe the justice system under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is now stacked against them.
Adding to the sense of injustice is that accounts from Muslim victims as well as reports from rights groups have indicated that leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the New Delhi police force tacitly supported the Hindu mobs during the fevered violence.
New Delhi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but they insisted last year that their investigation had been fair and that nearly 1,750 people had been booked in relation to the riots – half of them Hindus.
Junior Home Minister G Kishan Reddy has likewise told Parliament that police acted swiftly and impartially.
But a letter one senior police officer sent to investigators five months after the riots appeared to suggest to them they go easy on Hindus suspected of violence, prompting criticism from the Delhi High Court.
Communal clashes have broken out in India ever since the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
But in the last seven years, observers say, religious polarisation fuelled by the Hindu-nationalist base of Modi’s party has further deepened the fault lines and raised tensions.
Many believe the catalyst for last year’s riots was a fiery speech by Kapil Mishra, a BJP member.
On February 23, 2020, he gave police an ultimatum, warning them to break up a sit-in by demonstrators protesting against a new citizenship law Muslims say is discriminatory, or he and his supporters would do it themselves.
When his supporters moved in, it triggered pitched street battles that quickly turned into riots. For the next three days, Hindu mobs rampaged through streets hunting down Muslims – in some cases burning them to death in their homes – and torching entire neighbourhoods, including shops and mosques.
Mishra rejects the idea that he’s responsible for the riots, calling the claims “propaganda” to cover up the “preplanned genocide of Hindus by Muslims”.
On Monday, he said his party had no links to the violence, but added, “what I did last year I will do it again if needed”, referring to his speech hours before the riots started.
Many in the area’s Hindu community accuse Muslims of starting the violence in a bid to make India “look bad”.
‘Losing all hopes of justice’
A year on, many Muslim victims of the riots still fear further bloodletting. Hundreds have abandoned their gutted homes, many selling up at throwaway prices, and moved elsewhere.
Those who chose to stay have fortified their neighbourhoods with metal gates in case of more mob attacks. Many say they fear those responsible will never be held to account.
“Everything has changed since the riots,” Khan said. “I think I am slowly losing all my hopes of justice.”
Khan spent 20 days recovering in the hospital after being shot. Since then, he has been seeking justice that he says has been impeded by police at every turn.
Khan’s official police complaint, seen by The Associated Press, named at least six Hindu individuals from his neighbourhood who he said participated in the violence.
“The accused still come to my home and threaten me with killing my entire family,” Khan said in the complaint, adding that he was willing to identify them in court.
His complaint was never officially accepted.
Police, however, filed their own complaint, giving a version of events that placed Khan at least a kilometre (0.6 miles) from where he was shot, suggesting he was injured in the crossfire between two clashing groups. It did not identify his attackers.
The stories of many other Muslim victims follow a similar pattern. Police and investigators have dismissed hundreds of complaints against Hindu rioters, citing a lack of evidence despite multiple witness accounts.They include a man who saw his brother fatally shot, a father of a 4-month-old baby who witnessed his home being torched and a young boy who lost both his arms after Hindu mobs threw a crude bomb at him.
Now, many make weekly trips to lawyer Mehmood Pracha’s office, hoping for justice. Very few have seen their attackers put behind bars. Many others are still waiting for their cases to be heard in court.
Pracha, a Muslim, is representing at least 100 riot victims for free. He said there were multiple instances in which police were provided videos of Hindu mobs, many with links to Modi’s party, “but it seems that police were eager to implicate Muslims” in the riots.
He said in many cases Muslims were also “threatened to withdraw their complaints”.
“The police have acted as partners in crime,” Pracha said.
Multiple videos of the riots seen by the AP show police egging on Hindu mobs to throw stones at Muslims, destroying surveillance cameras and beating a group of Muslim men – one of whom later died.
Multiple independent fact-finding missions and rights groups have documented the role of the police in the riots.
In June 2020, Human Rights Watch said “police failed to respond adequately” during the riots and were at times “complicit” in attacks against Muslims. It also said authorities “failed to conduct impartial and transparent investigations”.
Haroon, who goes by one name, said he was “still scared of going out in the evening”.
He saw his brother Maroof fatally shot by his Hindu neighbours during the riots. The police never identified the accused in his complaint, despite multiple eyewitnesses.
Meanwhile, Haroon said, he was threatened by the police and the accused to withdraw his complaint.
“We were alone then and we are alone now,” he said nearly in tears as his dead brother’s two children sat beside him.
Haroon looked at them and said: “I don’t know what to do.”
The United States Department of Transportation inspector general has faulted “weaknesses” in US government certification of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that was grounded for 20 months after two crashes killed 346 people, according to a new report.
The 63-page report released on Wednesday said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not have a complete understanding of a Boeing Co safety system tied to both crashes.
It also said “much work remains to address weaknesses in FAA’s certification guidance and processes” and cited “management and oversight weaknesses”.
The 737 MAX re-entered commercial service in the US in December after the FAA approved changes that Boeing made to an automated flight-control system implicated in the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Boeing agreed to a $2.5bn settlement with the US Department of Justice in January into the MAX as part of a deferred prosecution agreement, a form of corporate plea bargain.
The FAA agreed to implement all 14 recommendations in the Department of Transportation report and said it “has already made substantial progress towards implementing reforms that address some of your recommendations.”
Boeing said it has “undertaken significant changes to reinforce our safety practices, and we have already made progress” on recommendations outlined in the report.
The report noted “instances where the same company engineer worked on a particular design and then approved the design” as a Boeing employee conducting certification tasks for the FAA.
‘Adequately independent’
The report added FAA needs to do more to ensure personnel conducting certification tasks “are adequately independent.” It was the second report by the inspector general’s office into the fatal crashes. The first, issued in June, disclosed Boeing had failed to submit documents to the FAA.
In December, Congress passed legislation reforming how the FAA certifies aeroplanes, especially the longstanding practice of delegating some certification tasks to manufacturers.The report urges the FAA to “incorporate lessons” from the accidents into “implementing a risk-based approach” in delegating oversight and said reforms “will be vital to restore confidence in FAA’s certification process and ensure the highest level of safety in future certification efforts”.
The new law boosts the FAA’s oversight of aircraft manufacturers, requires disclosure of critical safety information and new whistle-blower protections.
The legislation requires an independent review of Boeing’s safety culture.
The FAA said it is encouraging manufacturers to engage earlier in “their development process to provide the agency a better understanding of novel features.”
It is also working with other civil aviation authorities “to evaluate certification requirements for derivative aircraft, thus ensuring a consistent worldwide approach to safety and the similar evaluation and treatment of design changes.”
In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon – distinct from an ideological construct – has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.
Expectedly, such a project raised a lot of controversies to the extent that other scholars at Oxford penned an open letter dissociating themselves from such intended revisionism and whitewashing of the crimes of the empire. One leading member of the project resigned from it, citing personal reasons.
This month marks 136 years since the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where western powers met to set the rules for how they would divide up Africa. Historically, theoretically and empirically, it should be clear that the empire was a “death project” rather than an ethical force outside Europe; that war, violence and extractivism rather than any ethics defined the legacy of the empire in Africa.
But it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon.
The ‘ethics’ of empire?
In the Oxford research project, entitled Ethics and Empire (2017-22), Nigel Biggar, the university’s regius professor of moral and pastoral theology and director of the MacDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, sought to do two important interventions: to measure apologias and critiques of the empire against historical data from antiquity to modernity across the world; and to challenge the idea that empire is imperialist, imperialism is wicked, and empire is therefore unethical.
In support of its thesis, the description of the research project lists “examples” of the ethics of the empire: the British empire’s suppression of the “Atlantic and African slave trades” after 1807; granting Black Africans the vote at the Cape Colony 17 years before the United States granted it to African Americans; and offering “the only armed centre of armed resistance to European fascism between May 1940 and June 1941”.
But the selective use of such examples does not paint a complete picture. Any attempt to credit the British empire for the abolition of slavery, for instance, ignores the ongoing resistance of enslaved Africans from the moment of capture right up to the plantations in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 still stands as a symbol of this resistance: enslaved African people rose against racism, slavery and colonialism – demonstrating beyond doubt that the European institution of slavery was not sustainable.
The very fact that, in the Oxford research project, the chosen description is “the Atlantic and African slave trades” reveals an attempt to distance itself from the crime of slavery, to attribute it to the “ocean” (the Atlantic), and to the “Africans” as though they enslaved themselves. Where is the British empire in this description of the heinous kidnapping and commodification of the lives of Africans?
The second example, which highlights the very skewed granting of the franchise to a small number of so-called “civilised” Africans at the Cape Colony in South Africa as a gift of the empire, further demonstrates a misunderstanding of how colonialism dismembered and dehumanised African people. The fact is that African struggles were not undertaken for a trinket like getting voting rights under colonialism. They fought for decolonisation and rehumanisation.
The third example, that the British empire became the nerve centre of armed resistance to fascism during the second world war (1939-45), may be accurate. But it also ignores the fact that fascism became so repugnant to the British mainly because Adolf Hitler practised and applied the racism that was meant for “those people” in the colonies and brought it to the centre of Europe.
Projects like Briggar’s, and others with similar thought trajectories, risk endangering the truth about the crimes of the empire in Africa.
Afro-pessimism: Seeing disorder as the norm
What, fundamentally, is colonialism? Aimé Césaire, the Mantiniquean intellectual and poet, posed this deep and necessary question in his classical treatise Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955. In it, he argues that the colonial project was never benevolent and always motivated by self-interest and economic exploitation of the colonised.
But without a real comprehension of the true meaning of colonialism, there are all sorts of dangers of developing a complacent if not ahistorical and apologetic view of it, including the one that argues it was a moral evil with economic benefits to its victims. This view of colonialism is re-emerging within a context where some conservative metropolitan-based scholars of the empire are calling for a “balance sheet of the empire”, which weighs up the costs and benefits of colonialism. Meanwhile, some beneficiaries of the empire based in Africa are also adopting a revisionist approach, such as Helen Zille, the white former leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance party, who caused a storm when she said that apartheid colonialism was beneficial – by building the infrastructure and governance systems that Black Africans now use.
Both conservative and liberal revisionism in the studies of the empire and the impact of colonialism reflect shared pessimistic views about African development. The economic failures, and indeed elusive development, in Africa get blamed on the victims. The disorder is said to be the norm in Africa. Eating, that is, filling the “belly” is said to be the characteristic of African politics. African leadership is roundly blamed for the mismanagement of economies in Africa. (Yes, there are economies in Africa, not African economies; African economies were long destroyed by colonialism.)
In a photo from 1935, people are seen walking in the village of the Brussels International Exposition, World’s Fair in Belgium. The theme of the World’s Fair was colonisation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Congo Free State [Herbert Felton/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
While it is true that African leaders contribute to economic and development challenges through things like corruption, the key problems on the continent are structural, systemic and institutional. That is why even leaders like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who were not corrupt, did not succeed in changing the character of inherited colonial economies so as to benefit the majority of African peoples.
Today, what exacerbates these ahistorical, apologetic and patronising views of the impact of colonialism on Africa is the return of crude right-wing politics – the kind embodied by former US President Donald Trump, that remains even after his term has ended. It is the strong belief in inherent white supremacy and in the inherent inferiority of the rest.
But right-wing politics is also locking horns with resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century, symbolised by global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. However, to mount a credible critique to apologias for the empire, the starting point is to clearly define colonialism.
On colonisation, colonialism, coloniality
Three terms – colonisation, colonialism and coloniality – if correctly clarified, help in gaining a deeper understanding of the empire and the damage colonialism has had on African economies and indeed on African lives.
Colonisation names the event of conquest and administration of the conquered. It can be dated in the case of South Africa from 1652 to 1994; in the case of Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1980; and in the case of Western and Eastern Africa from 1884 to 1960. Those who confused colonisation and colonialism conceptually, ended up pushing forward a very complacent view of colonialism which defined it as a mere “episode in African history” (a short interlude: 1884-1960). While this intervention from the Ibadan African Nationalist School of History was informed by the noble desire to dethrone imperialist/colonialist historiography which denied the existence of African history prior to the continent’s encounter with Europeans, it ended up minimising the epochal impact of colonialism on Africa.
It was Peter Ekeh of the University of Ibadan, in his Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Colonialism and Social Structure of 1980, who directly challenged the notion that colonialism was an episode in African history. He posited that colonialism was epochal in its impact as it was and is a system of power that is multifaceted in character. It is a power structure that subverts, destroys, reinvents, appropriates, and replaces anything it deems an obstacle to the agenda of colonial domination and exploitation.
19 December 1957: Algerians under French orders set up a barbed wire barrier on the border between Tunisia and Algeria. Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956; Algeria remained a French colony until 1962 [Keystone/Getty Images]
Eke’s definition of colonialism resonated with that of Frantz Fanon who explained, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism was never satisfied with the conquest of the colonised, it also worked to steal the colonised people’s history and to epistemically intervene in their psyche.
Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe is also correct in positing that the fundamental question in colonialism was a planetary one: to whom does the earth belong? Thus, as a planetary phenomenon, its storm troopers, the European colonialists, were driven by the imperial idea of the earth as belonging to them. This is why at the centre of colonialism is the “coloniality of being”, that is, the colonisation of the very idea and meaning of being human.
This was achieved through two processes: first, the social classification of the human population; and second, the racial hierarchisation of the classified human population. This was a necessary colonial process to distinguish those who had to be subjected to enslavement, genocide and colonisation.
The third important concept is that of coloniality. It was developed by Latin American decolonial theorists, particularly Anibal Quijano. Coloniality names the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and its replication in contemporary times. It links very well with the African epic school of colonialism articulated by Ekeh and dovetails well with Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of neocolonialism. All this speaks to the epochal impact of colonialism. One therefore wonders how Africa could develop economically under this structure of power and how could colonialism be of benefit to Africa. To understand the negative economic impact of colonialism on Africa, there is a need to appreciate the four journeys of capital and its implications for Africa.
Four journeys of colonial capital and entrapment
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe, distilled the four journeys of capital from its mercantile period to its current financial form and in each of the journeys, he plotted the fate of Africa.
The first is the epoch of enslavement of Africans and their shipment as cargo out of the continent. This drained Africa of its most robust labour needed for its economic development. The second was the exploitation of African labour in the plantations and mines in the Americas without any payment so as to enable the very project of Euromodernity and its coloniality. The third is the colonial moment where Africa was scrambled for and partitioned among seven European colonial powers (Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal) and its resources (both natural and human) were exploited for the benefit of Europe. The fourth moment is the current one characterised by “debt slavery” whereby a poor continent finances the developed countries of the world. Overseeing this debt slavery is the global financial republic constituted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other financial institutions. All these exploitative journeys of capital were enabled by colonialism and coloniality.
A picture taken in December 1937 shows Togolese children working in a field. Togo was first part of the German colonies from 1884, and later administered by France after World War I until it gained independence in 1960 [File: AFP]
Empirically and concretely, colonialism radically ordered Africa into economic zones of exploitation. This reality is well expressed by Samir Amin who identified three main colonial zones.
The first is the “cash crops zone” covering Western and Eastern Africa, where colonialism inaugurated “peasant trade colonies” whereby Africans were forced to abandon cultivation of food crops and instead produce cash crops for an industrialising Europe.
The second zone was that of extractive colonial plantations symbolised by the Congo Free State which was owned by King Leopold II of Belgium; Africans were forced to produce rubber, and extreme violence including the decapitation of limbs was used to enforce this colonial system.
The third zone was that of “labour reserves” inaugurated by settler colonialism. The Southern Africa region was the central space of settler colonies, where Africans were physically removed from their lands and the lands taken over by the white settlers. Those African who survived the wars of conquest were pushed into crowded reserves where they existed as a source of cheap labour for mines, farms, plantations, factories, and even domestic work.
This colonial ordering of economies in Africa has remained intact even after more than 60 years of decolonisation. This is because attaining political independence did not include attaining economic decolonisation. At the moment of political decolonisation, Europe actively worked to develop strategies such as Eurafrica, Françafrique, Lomé Conventions, the Commonwealth and others to maintain its economic domination over Africa.
Roadblocks to development
Like all human beings, Africans were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems which enabled them to survive as a people, to benefit from their environment, to invent tools, and to organise themselves socially on their own terms.
The success story of the people of Egypt to utilise the resources of the Nile River to build the Egyptian civilisation, which is older than the birth of modern Europe, is a testimony of how the people and the continent were self-developing and self-improving on their own terms.
The invention of stone tools and the revolutionary shift to the iron tools prior to colonialism is another indication of African people making their own history. The domestication of plants and animals is another evidence of African revolutions. This is what colonialism destroyed as it created a colonial order and economy that had no African interests at its centre.
9 November 1895: Colonial administrator Major Lothaire listens to a dispute in the Congo Free State [Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
Flourishing pre-colonial African economies of the Kingdom of Kongo, Songhai, Mali, Ancient Ghana, Dahomey – which were for the benefit of African people – were first of all exposed to the devastating impact of the slave trade and later subjected to violent colonialism. What this birthed were economies in Africa rather than African economies – economies that were outside-looking-in in orientation – to sustain the development of Europe.
Fundamentally, the economies in Africa became extractive in nature. By the time direct colonialism was rolled back after 1945, the African leaders inherited colonial economies where Africans participated as providers of cheap labour rather than owners of the economies. These externally oriented economies could not survive as anything else but providers of cheap raw materials. They were and are entrapped in well-crafted colonial matrices of power with a well-planned division of labour.
Today, the economies in Africa remain artificial and fragile to the extent that any attempt to reorient them to serve the majority of African people, sees them flounder and collapse. This is because their scaffold and pivot are colonial relations of exploitation, not decolonial relations of empowerment and equitable distribution of resources.
For real future development and a successful move from economies in Africa towards true African economies, there is a need to revolutionise the asymmetrical colonial power structures that still govern the fate of the continent.
Swedish striker, who has Bosnian roots, was subjected to ethnic abuse by an individual seated in a VIP box in Serbia.
UEFA has opened a disciplinary investigation after Italian club AC Milan’s striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic was subjected to ethnic abuse in last week’s Europa League match against Red Star Belgrade in Serbia.
Serbian media reported that Ibrahimovic, who has Bosnian roots, was insulted by an individual seated in the Red Star stadium’s VIP box during the February 18 match.
“An Ethics and Disciplinary Inspector has been appointed today to conduct a disciplinary investigation regarding incidents which occurred during the UEFA Europa League Round of 32 match,” UEFA said in a statement on Thursday.
Ibrahimovic did not play in the game but a TV channel broadcast scenes of the Swede as the voice of a man chanted an abusive term at him several times.
The word is a pejorative slur for Bosniak Muslims used by Serbian nationalists.
Swedish striker Ibrahimovic’s father is a Bosniak from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
No fans attended the match because of COVID-19 restrictions, but the stadium’s hospitality boxes on the top of its western stands, that can accommodate several hundred people, were packed.
Tickets for those seats are usually not put on sale but are given either to the club’s guests or to journalists.
Ibrahimovic was seated in the stadium’s west tier behind the dugouts along with other Milan substitutes and staff.
Last week, Red Star apologised to Ibrahimovic in a statement and said they would work with authorities to identify the offender.
The killings of hundreds of civilians by Eritrean troops in the ancient Ethiopian town of Axum in November last year amounted to “a series of human rights and humanitarian law violations”, according to Amnesty International.
The killings in Axum, located some 187km (116 miles) north of Mekelle, capital of the Tigray region, occurred during the armed conflict between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) last year.
On November 28 and 29, Eritrean troops killed hundreds of civilians in a “coordinated and systematic” manner in order “to terrorize the population into submission”, the report, released on Friday, said.
The 41 witnesses and survivors of the massacre, all ethnic Tigrayans interviewed by Amnesty, said Eritrean forces carried out extrajudicial executions and engaged in widespread looting.
The violations began on November 19 when Eritrean and Ethiopian forces entered Axum, indiscriminately shelling the city and firing at those who tried to flee, Amnesty said, adding that after the massacre, Eritrean forces detained hundreds of residents and threatened renewed killing if they encountered resistance.
The killings, the indiscriminate shelling of Axum and the looting of property “may amount to war crimes”, Amnesty said.
Axum residents identified the perpetrators as Eritrean soldiers, saying that they often rode in trucks with licence plates reading “Eritrea”.
Witnesses said most wore a uniform easily distinguishable from Ethiopian soldiers, some Eritrean soldiers wore the uniform of the Ethiopian army, but were easily identified for their plastic shoes known as “Congo chama” or “shida”, which are popular in Eritrea, witnesses said.
Some soldiers had three scars on each temple near the eye, marking them as Beni-Amir, an ethnic group that straddles Sudan and Eritrea but is absent from Ethiopia.
Language also distinguished the Eritreans: The Tigrinya dialect that Eritrean soldiers speak is distinctive, with its own words and accent.
Ethiopian and Eritrean authorities have made contradictory statements regarding the involvement of Eritrean troops in the Tigray conflict, with some high-ranking officials denying their presence but others acknowledging it, Amnesty added.
Ethiopia’s government has denied the presence of Eritrean soldiers in the conflict.
Last month, the US said all soldiers from Eritrea should leave the Tigray region “immediately”.
Witnesses have estimated that Eritrean soldiers number in the thousands. Eritrean officials have not responded to questions.
The information minister for Eritrea tweeted last month that “the rabid defamation campaign against Eritrea is on the rise again”.
Deliberate targeting of civilians
Amnesty quoted residents who said that the troops also carried out systematic house-to-house raids to kill teenage and adult men.
One man who had found refuge in an unfinished building said he saw a group of six Eritrean soldiers kill a neighbour with a vehicle-mounted heavy machine gun on the street near the Mana Hotel.
“He was standing. I think he was confused. They were probably around 10 metres from him. They shot him in the head,” the man was quoted as saying.
Another man, who had run out of the city, returned at night after the shooting stopped.
“All we could see on the streets were dead bodies and people crying,” he said.
In December, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet called the situation in Tigray “exceedingly worrying and volatile” after fighting was reported in areas surrounding Mekelle, Sheraro and Axum “in spite of government claims to the contrary”.
“We have corroborated information of gross human rights violations and abuses including indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects, looting, abductions and sexual violence against women and girls,” Bachelet told reporters.
The conflict shook one of Africa’s most powerful and populous countries, leaving thousands of people dead and causing some 950,000 to flee their homes.
But little is known about the situation for most of Tigray’s six million people, as journalists are blocked from entering, communications are patchy and many aid workers have struggled to obtain permission to enter.
A recent report detected several government agencies using Circles’ platforms to snoop on texts, calls and locate private individuals.
As internet penetration and smartphone usage increases across Africa, digital spaces have become increasingly important in organising opposition movements. In response, several governments have at times shut down the internet or blocked social media apps. More recently, however, some regimes have turned to digital surveillance technology for more subtle ways to crush resistance.
In a recent report titled Running in Circles, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab – which investigates digital espionage against civil society – details how 25 governments around the world are using tools developed by the Israeli telecoms company Circles. Its technology is sold to nation-states only. It intercepts data from 3G networks, allowing the infiltrator to read messages, emails, and listen in on phone calls as they occur. Using only a telephone number, a Circles platform can also identify the location of a phone anywhere in the world within seconds without a warrant.
Circles is affiliated with the notorious NSO Group, whose Pegasus spyware has been widely used to spy on human rights defenders and journalists. Unlike that technology, however, Circles’ tools does not require targets to click on a malicious link. It works by exploiting flaws in Signalling System No.7 (SS7), the set of protocols that allows networks to exchange calls and text messages between each other. SS7 is predominantly used in 2G and 3G systems, which in 2019 became the leading mobile technology in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for over 45% of all connections.
With the faster and possibly more secure 4G networks years away from becoming the standard for mobile connectivity in Africa, Circles technology is ideal for power-hungry African leaders looking to spy on critics. Indeed, of the 25 countries identified as likely to be using Circles’ tools, seven are on the continent.
Nigeria
Citizen Lab detected two Circles systems being used in Nigeria. It identified one likely client as being the Nigerian Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), while a 2016 investigation by the Premium Times found that the governors of Delta and Bayelsa states used Circles to spy on opponents.
Nigeria has a long history of surveillance technologies being used against civil society and government critics. Femi Adeyeye, a Lagos-based political activist who has been detained several times, cites several cases – such as those of Omoyele Sowore, Abubakar Idris Dadiyata and Stephen Kefas – in which Nigerians have been swiftly traced, arrested and detained after criticising the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has also reported numerous cases of the Nigerian authorities targeting journalists’ phones.
“We are already in the worst stage of dictatorship,” says Adeyeye. “Freedom of expression, media, and political association have been further weakened by this spying technology.”
He suggests that political analysts now self-censor, particularly since witnessing the government’s infiltration of the #EndSARS movement against police brutality in late-2020. “They have seen how people have been traced, their passports seized, bank accounts frozen and they have been forced to go into exile,” he says.
Zimbabwe
Three Circles platforms were detected in Zimbabwe. The use of one dates back to 2013, while another was activated in March 2018. The Zimbabwean government has long targeted its critics and opponents. Last year, investigative journalist Hopewell Chin’ono and opposition politician Jacob Ngarivhume were detained ahead of anti-government protests. Circles technology may be facilitating this repression.
Equatorial Guinea
In Equatorial Guinea, Circles technologies have been operating since 2013. For 40 years, President Teodoro Obiang has kept power partly by suppressing opponents by using torture, extra-judicial executions, arbitrary arrests, and the persecution of political activists and human rights defenders. Obiang has violently crushed protests and ignored demands for electoral reforms and term limits. Surveillance methods could be an important part of his toolbox.
Morocco
Morocco’s Ministry of the Interior has been a Circles Client since 2018. Rabat has a history of leveraging digital technology to unlawfully target human rights activists.
Botswana
Despite being hailed as one of Africa’s most democratic countries, Botswana’s Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services (DISS) is linked to two Circles surveillance systems dating back to 2015. The DISS is known for targeting journalists investigating political corruption.
According to Moeti Mohwasa, spokesperson for the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), Israeli companies have been selling spying software to the Botswana government for years. He alleges that this equipment has been used to eavesdrop on opposition politicians and union leaders.
Kenya
Citizen Lab detected a Circles system being used in Kenya. This did not surprise Suhayl Omar, who researches policing, surveillance, and militarism in Nairobi.
“In Kenya, freedom of expression and media freedoms are under constant threat. The [Uhuru] Kenyatta regime has waged a war against constitutionalism and any form of opposition in Kenya,” he says. “The Kenyan government relies heavily on surveillance of its citizens to crack down on any form of opposition.”
Zambia
Zambia appears to be another Circles client. Its government also has a record of using surveillance against its critics. In 2019, authorities arrested a group of bloggers who ran an opposition news site, allegedly with the aid of a cyber-surveillance unit in Zambia’s telecommunications regulator used to pinpoint the bloggers’ locations. It is not known if a Circles system was used but the technology has these capabilities.
Should the Israeli government be held responsible?
The ultimate responsibility for using these surveillance technologies lies with the government agencies that pay huge sums for them. However, some campaigners argue that the Israeli government shoulders some responsibility too for allowing questionable tech firms such as Circles to operate and by providing them with export licenses.
Israeli minister Zeev Elkin has refuted this suggestion, insisting that “everyone understands that this is not about the state of Israel”. But many disagree.
“The Israeli regime has actively enabled the authoritarianism of Uhuru Kenyatta,” says Omar. Mohwasa makes the same argument regarding the government in Botswana which he suggests is increasingly eroding civil rights. “Israel is aiding these dangerous trends,” he adds.
In January 2020, Amnesty International filed a lawsuit in Israel calling for the Defence Ministry to ban the export of invasive spying software. In July, a court denied the request.
According to some analysts, the sale of spying equipment is in fact an important part of Israel’s diplomatic charm offensive in Africa. Tel Aviv has been forging closer partnerships with governments on the continent in recent years in the hope of diminishing African solidarity with Palestine and gaining supportive votes in the UN. Helping rulers stay in power – even at the cost of widespread popular freedoms – is one way to make friends.
A picture taken in December 1937 shows Togolese children working in a field. Togo was first part of the German colonies from 1884, and later administered by France after World War I until it gained independence in 1960 [File: AFP]
9 November 1895: Colonial administrator Major Lothaire listens to a dispute in the Congo Free State [Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
