'Am proud I am an African,
Of the thickness of my lips,
Of the colour of my skin,
Of the texture of my hair,
It all sums up that 'am indeed an African.

Born in the valleys of beautiful land,
The land of Kilimanjaro,
Who does not know this land?
Indeed, I am an African in spirit and soul,
It all sums up that, am in deed an African.

The world knows about Africa continent,
From the ancient Egyptians times,
Whom civilisation is first traced,
With so much riches and yet unexplored,
Investors find routes to dig it all up,
It all sums up that, Africa is blessed.

Wake up people of Africa,
Let's dig up the treasures,
For the continent needs to advance,
Otherwise guests gonna dig them all up,
It all sums up that, Africa, it's time to wake up.

Nevertheles brothers and sisters,
United we stand to support each other,
Why not share our intelect,
For the prosperous Africa?
It all sums up that, we are Africans INDEED.

L e t u s a w a k e n u p p e o p l e! ! ! !

"Amandla Ngawethu, Amandla Ngawethu..!!!!!!!" These are Xhosa words that will never be erased from my mind. They simply means "power to the people."

Freedom struggle is a stage inlife that majority of African countries went through. That is why statemen like Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana fought hard to see, one day the African continent becomes one and its people realise that we are all "brothers and sisters" hence, support to each other independencewise, economicwise and developmentalwise gets a prime focus and attention.

Among many countries in the continent, South Africa will never be forgotten for struggles such as the Soweto Uprising, which took place in Soweto, not far from Johannesberg. It was in 1976 when the youth of Soweto took up a protest in demand for the freedom in education. The 1976 killings in Soweto came as a result of youth protesting against reinforcement by the apartheid regime by then, to study Afrikaans. The students in the country never wanted Afrikaans and instead they wanted to be taught in their own vernacular local languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Tsuthu, etc.

Lead by a brave young man Tsie Tsi Mashinini who was the First President of the Soweto Student Council,(aged 19 at that time), students potested against the reinforcement to learn Afrikaans because, the Afrikaans speaking community speifically the Boers and the Coloureds, never wanted and still do not want to learn the local languages such as Zulu, Xhosa Tsuthu etc, why should them (the black students) learn their language? Remember, there were separate schools for blacks, whites, coulored and Indians those days, and this reinforcement was to be applied to the black schools. To them Afrikans at tht time was the language oppresors hence they didn't want it.These days though a few Afrikaans speaking people are learning it. Afrikans is a mixture of German, Dutch, English. It is a language of its own kind and they (the student of thoe days of 1976) found it difficult too.

I happened to have been part of this year's commemoration of this 1976 Soweto Student Uprising, all I could hear most, among other things like flash-back of june 1976 incident, were songs of freedom on radios, TVs and in the streets, I could hear repeteadly songs such as "Hamba Kahle" which means "go well", the popular "Amandla Ngawethu" song which I did sing while in school those day of 1976-1989 too to support the fight againt apartheid.

These emotional memories, did not take place in Soweto alone, the plan was, the protest march to start in Soweto in Soweto first on the June 16th 1976, and later dates on other areas countrywide. There was a wide coordination that other places through out the country were to follow on planned dates. Places like Nyanga, Langa (Brenda Fassie's home town) which are in Cape own also partipated though Soweto is a place where the brutal shooting took place.

The Youth in Soweto at that time, were determined and among them was a very young boy called Hetor Peterson who was only 13 years old then. On the day of the Soweto Uprising, he was shot near the bridge as they were marching to protest. Protesters were tear-gased by helicopters and killed by the police at that time. As mentioned above, the other charismatic leader was Tsie Tsi Mashinini, he was caught by police and was tortured to reveal the details of the movement, but he refused. When asked of the movement information, he boldly said, I'd rather die with it than say it to you. Tsie Tsi Mashinini was shot by a gun directly, he died because there were informers who informed the then apartheid regime, otherwise Mashinini would have done much to the struggle.

On the commemoration of this day, among other things, President Thabo Mbeki remembered greatly two main youths of 1976 i.e. Tsie tsi Mashinini and Hector Peterson. He paid his respect on June 16th 2006 in Soweto at the Tsie Tsi Mashinini Memorial and also inaugurted the renovated Park near the Moris Isackson School a place in Soweto where the protest march begun on June 16th in 1976. This renovated Park has been named "Hector Peterson Memorial" in memory of the young boy aged 13 who was shot by the place near the bridge. Hector Peterson was imortalised, all the seven bullets went to his body at such a tender age!!!!!!!

One thing I would like us to know is that, before starting classes, students were supposed to sing "Our Father prayer", but on the June 16th 1976 the day the students were to make their peaceful march, they had decided in their secret meeting before the marching-day that, all black schools supporting their struggle in South Africa, will not sing the Our Father prayer and instead, they will sing the "NKOSI SIKELELA AFRICA" (meaning 'God bless Africa') and so they sung and it was a shock to teachers even because they knew nothing about this plan by the students.

This emotional memories, have a great challenge in our lives today. I remember while in school, we used to sing songs like "Soweto, Soweto... ahaaaaa, say NO to apatheid say NO....." With this song I remember Lilian Omary whom we lead the school choir together at Weruweru Girls Secondary School in Moshi. They were sad moments, whenever we sung this song, tears rolled through my cheecks, I felt it as if I had been to Soweto.

The challenge we have currently based on this emotional and teachable memories is that, are there people today who are ready to take up issues in pursuance as these youths of 1976 in Soweto South Africa did? They sacrificed their lives, for what South Africans are enjoying today. Are there people out there who can today take upfront issues like Human Rights, HIV/AIDS, drugs, unemployment, crime activities, criminalexcalation, child abuse, rape, iliteracy, not serious about education, kidnpping etc, and make a diference as Youth? Halooo..., When I say Youth, I mean anybody before the age of 50 years.

The vigour and energy perpetuated by the South African Youth of 1976 in Soweto and elsewhere in the country, though were violently removed from their homes and had to stay elsewhere for their safety, but they persisted. This spirit should be used to overcome current challenging issues among youth and the society at large

Let's take up the determination shown by the Soweto Youth of 1976 and fit ourselves in the need of the moment in our countries and in the continent atlarge. Let's lobby and patner with governments so as to buld our countries and the continent together bcause the work ahead, is not a one-man's show, it calls for collective responsibility. Yes, one cannot deny that the Youth of today are assertive, they listen, they think of their personal advancement too, but we need to enlarge our vision of involvement. The tenacity of the youth of 1976 in Soweto South Africa, is what should be applied today in the current challenges.

Africa as a continet..., a time has reached when we need to act all of us in unison, from Egypt, Morocco downwards to South Africa, from Congo Brazaville eastwards to Tanzania, we are Africans and part of this continent, let's take our potential roles and take part in transforming this mother continent called A F R I C A.

Let me make it clear here, June 16 1976 Uprising, is connected to many struggles before and after. It was more than language issue. There were issues about work which were started in 1968 by the start of SASWA (the Black organisation workmanship in particular). They all take part in the struggle of freedom in South Africa.

Today, we don't have to die for freedom as it was in the days of independence struggle everywere, all we have to do is, take the freedom that is there and make something for ourselves, our respective countries and the continent atlarge. This Soweto Youth Uprising fact, has led South Africans today to enjoy the freedom to choose the language they want, it is the freedom which claimed many lives then in a difficult struggle which orchetrated a peaceful march which turned into bloodshed(it is approximated that around 15,000 youths may have been killed that day). Now those who want, they choose to learn Afrikaans not by force as it was then.

Let The Soweto Youth Uprising which was a generational struggle, stir up Young Africans around the continent and the globe, to be activated and act especially in matters related to Africa as a continet. It's time to take up responsibility in our continent as did Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. They always said, "We are not free if other countries in Africa are not independent", that is why Tanzania helped many freedom fighters such as South Africans, Namibians, Angolans, Mozambicans etc.

It's time to act, reract, grab and plan positive for Africa.
Long Live Africa, Long Live!!!!!!!!!!!

"My goodness, these boys are terrific" these were the words I heard all around Cape Town after Ghana Football Team to the world Cup beat USA and secured a game to pklay with Brazil, thw world's champions.

It all started as a joke, but these guys meant bussiness. Fighting for Ghana as well as Africa. Though representing Ghana in the world Cup, but it ended up turning into a represention of Africa.

I was amazed at how African people in Africa, in South Africa, Jamaica and around the world the way they came up and gave all their support to Ghana.To me it was indeed the Pride of frica. It really demonstratd that, though in Africa we are divided by vboarders set but certain colonisers, the African spirit of oneness and unity still remains.

I myself am a fun of Basketball, but this time with what Ghana boys did in the world Cup, I found myself not stopping to say, "I am proud to be born an African by flesh and blood and on top of all, of the colour of my skin too"

It still remains a great achievement for Ghana to have gotten an opoortunity to play with Brazil though the results discourged many, but sorry, "not me." Istill believe, Ghana had all the potentils nad hence, we ought to stand nd support all African teams in whatever kind of a gam they might be.

Out there, African Unity seem to irritate some people, but I remember what Nyere and Kwame Nkrumah fought for, i.e. African Unity. I stand behind them in this whole heartedlty.

I feel gret though I do not know even a singl rle of footbal, but guys, there is an inborn sense of identity in all African around the globe, that is "we are bothers" wherever we go nd re. This is the pride of Africanity.

Long Live African Unity, Long Live.
Aluta continua!!!!!!!!!

AFRICA’s first elected female head of state Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was yesterday sworn in as Liberia's president, pledging a "fundamental break" with the nation's violent past.

'Introduction: The Many Voices of Africa'
John Ryle
'Africa is far less homogenous—geographically, culturally, religiously and politically—than Europe or the Americas. South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan.'

It has been the year of Africa, the year, according to Our Common Interest, the report of Tony Blair's Commission for Africa, when a combination of indigenous resolve and cash from Western governments was to launch a new assault on the roots of poverty in the continent, stimulating trade, increasing aid, tackling corruption, cancelling debt. In the months since the appearance of the Commission's report, events in African countries have had higher than usual media visibility—but not because of progress in combating poverty. It's been the familiar cavalcade of war, famine and mass killing—in Sudan, then Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire, then Sudan again. In the West, in the world's lucky countries, it may have been the year of Africa; but for many Africans, in much of Africa, it was another year of living on the edge.

Still, the Commission could be right to see change on the way. In a number of African countries things do seem to be getting better. Across the continent civil wars are fewer and gross national product is on the up. The mistake is to generalize. The very word Africa—that sonorous trisyllable—seems to invite grandiloquence. Because the continent has a clear geographical unity it is tempting to hold forth about it. Cecil Rhodes wanted to colour everything imperial red from the Cape to Cairo; since then the tendency has been for Westerners—and often Africans too—to seek to impose a single reality, a general explanation, on the whole place. So one newspaper report can say that 'Africa has never been more dangerous, nor more ready to join the rest of the world'; another that 'Africa is coming together, taking its fate into its own hands.' Which Africa is being discussed in each case? Can Botswana, that haven of stability, be more dangerous than ever? Is Equatorial Guinea ready to join the rest of the world? Is the African Union 'taking its fate into its own hands'?

The idea that the diverse polities of Africa—even of sub-Saharan Africa—form a single entity is, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, the product of European colonialism, of romantic imperialism. It is a notion since embraced by other epic dreamers: Rastafarians, pan-Africanists and now, it seems, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In truth Africa is far less homogenous—geographically, culturally, religiously and politically—than Europe or the Americas. South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan. To say that Africa has 'never been more dangerous' because of wars in Congo or Sudan, is like saying Eurasia has never been more dangerous because of Chechnya. It is generalizing that is dangerous. A century of colonization by Europe, which failed to bring Cecil Rhodes' vision to pass, is the principal source of any historical affinities that exist between one African country and another. And this is the ultimate source of the combination of strategic interest and moral concern that finds expression today in the Commission for Africa, a body that brings together the great and the good of both continents.
Our Common Interest duly warns against generalization, then goes on to generalize. Africa, it says:

'has suffered from governments that have looted the resources of the state; that could not or would not deliver services to their people; that in many cases were predatory, corruptly extracting their countries' resources; that maintained control through violence and bribery, and that squandered or stole aid.'

All of this is true. But why the past tense? Has the violence and corruption ceased? And why are there no specifics of this looting and embezzlement? Should those responsible not be named and the exceptions be applauded? The recommendations of the Commission include, after all, an unprecedented level of debt forgiveness and financial aid to African governments. There is, to put it mildly, some risk of throwing good money after bad. A look at the list of Commissioners provides a clue to this reticence in the report. They include two African heads of state, former President Benjamin Mpaka of Tanzania and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. On the whole African big men don't pull their neighbours down, whatever their crimes against their own people. That's why South African President Thabo Mbeki refuses to condemn Robert Mugabe. And why Mugabe gives refuge in Zimbabwe to Mengistu Haile Mariam, Meles Zenawi's murderous predecessor. Perhaps it is surprising that those who drafted the report of the Commission, a well-researched and frequently forceful document, got as much plain talk into it as they did.

The optimism of the Commission should not be dismissed, either. The capacity for hope in the face of catastrophe is a characteristically African gift. How else could people who suffer so much survive? In Sudan, where I work part of the year, the conflict in Darfur has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, victims of a government counter-insurgency campaign that uses tribal militias as proxy fighters. In January 2005, members of this government concluded a peace agreement with rebels in the south of the country, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, ending the twenty-year civil war there. The government calculated, no doubt, that international pressure over the massacres in Darfur would be constrained by unwillingness on the part of the West to put in jeopardy the deal with the SPLM. And they were right. Despite huffing and puffing by various parties, the government of Sudan got away with mass murder. The North–South peace deal in Sudan is called, optimistically, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, but comprehensive peace in large parts of the country is absent. Peace there, as a Sudanese saying has it, is the milk of birds.

The language of peace-making is everywhere, though. Sometimes it is curiously belligerent. ANGELIC PEACE LOCOMOTIVE CRUSHES LIFE OUT OF WAR DEVIL MONGERS was the headline in one Khartoum newspaper reporting the agreement. The less peace there is, the more people want to hear the magic word. A South Sudanese hip-hop artist, Emmanuel Jal, and a veteran northern Sudanese musician, Abdel Gadir Salim, recently recorded an album called Ceasefire. The two singers have never met: their album was made by sending recorded tracks back and forth between London, Khartoum and Nairobi, in Kenya, where Jal has been living. The result of this collaboration-at-a-distance is a wondrous fusion of the 6/8 merdoum rhythm of western Sudan with rap techniques honed in the dance halls of Nairobi. The songs are in a mix of English, Arabic, Nuer (Jal's native language) and Sheng, a street language that is Kenya's equivalent of the Spanglish spoken by Latinos in North America. In July, Jal performed in Cornwall at one of Bob Geldof's Live 8 concerts. In August, he sang at the memorial event in London for John Garang, leader of the SPLM, who was killed in a helicopter accident shortly after the formation of the new government in Khartoum.

To meet him, Jal is the model of a modern hip-hop artist, all torn T-shirt, fatigues, neck chains, and back-to-front baseball cap. His lyrics, though, are a long way from the febrile swagger of gangsta rap. Jal was a child soldier in Sudan, where guns are easier to get hold of than iPods, so he has seen enough of the real thing. As anti-war poetry, his songs, 'Gua' ('Good' in Nuer) and 'Ya Salaam' ('Yo! Peace' in Arabic), may not be quite in the Wilfred Owen league. But Wilfred Owen never had this array of tablas and saxophones and ululating backing vocalists supporting him:
'Just think for a minute
It will be so good when there'll be peace in my homeland
Not one sister will be forced into marriage
Not one cow will be taken by force
And not one person will starve from hunger again
Children will go to school, I hope we can do this
I can't wait for that day'

Our Common Interest puts a stress on culture as a driving force in the fate of nations. By 'culture' the report means mainly political culture, the energy of local communal organizations and, contentiously, religious networks. There's a tip of the hat to language and the arts, but this could have been taken further. Take Jal's multilingualism—striking on the world stage, but not so remarkable in sub-Saharan Africa, where everyone speaks two languages at least. The continent is home to more than 2,000 of them—2,058 according to the website www.ethnologue.com (and they're not counting Sheng). That's a third of the global total. Most of these languages were born to blush unseen, known beyond their spoken range only by proverbs, part of the great treasury that the Commission on Africa refers to as 'intangible cultural heritage'. No one has counted the number of proverbs in Africa. A recently-published collection of sayings of the Akan of Ghana catalogues 7,015 from this single ethnic group. As Francis Bacon wrote, 'the genius, wit and spirit of a Nation are discovered by their proverbs'. If every African language boasted as many proverbs as the Akan do there would be fourteen million altogether, enough to tie several government commissions in knots.
Language is an area where Africans have an edge over Europeans or Americans. And in this respect many outsiders such as myself, who claim some understanding of African countries, practise a double standard. No respectable British or American news organization would dream of sending a representative to France who was not fluent in French, or to Russia without Russian, but it is rare to find a Western journalist—or a foreign aid worker—who speaks any African language properly. This is true even in places that have been the subject of quite intense, long-term, sophisticated news coverage, such as South Africa. How many of the Western correspondents who have made their reputations there speak Sotho, Xhosa, Sindebele or Afrikaans?

Some months back I called in on an acquaintance in Nairobi, Dr Bellario Ahoy, a medical doctor who served for many years in the Sudan People's Liberation Army and has recently been appointed to a post in the new government in South Sudan. In the interstices of war service, Dr Bellario managed to make a collection of proverbial lore in his native language, Dinka. Like all such collections these Dinka sayings combine universal received wisdom with cultural specificities, clichés with odd and striking images, admonitions with their opposites. Some are oracular and hard to understand. When I saw him, Dr Bellario, contemplating the destruction of his homeland, quoted the words of the early twentieth-century Dinka prophet Ariathdit. On returning home after long imprisonment by the British, Ariathdit spoke these words, which have become a Dinka catchphrase: Piny nhom abi riak mac, 'the land may be spoiled yet it will remain intact'. Dr Bellario glosses the phrase as Ariathdit's realization that although he had lost his battle against the British, this did not mean that the whole Dinka world would be destroyed. War and peace, good and bad fortune, all offer the chance of renewal. This dignity in the face of catastrophe is a kind of optimism. It combines fatalism, opportunism, and a sense of the limitations of human understanding. As the Mongo, in neighbouring Central Africa, put it, the root does not know what the leaf has in mind. Dr Bellario has a personal project that he would like to organize: a cultural exchange scheme where young people from one area of Sudan will go and live in the territory of another tribe and learn their language (and presumably their proverbial wisdom too). In other parts of Africa, not held back by war, this has happened already. Though most African countries are still predominantly rural, they will, on average, become fifty per cent urban in a couple of decades. And, as elsewhere in the world, the city is the site of hybrid vigour. Sheng, the language of East African hip-hop, is an example: a third-generation hybrid, mixing Swahili (an East African lingua franca, with a Bantu backbone and Arabic extremities) with English, our familiar Anglo-Saxon creole, it has spread by hip-hop artists like Jal, and by the drivers and turnboys who operate matatus, the devil-may-care minibuses that are the core of the public transport system in East Africa. Kwani? is a literary and political magazine published in Nairobi. (The name means 'So What?' in Sheng.) Although most of the contents of Kwani? are in English, the magazine includes pieces where Sheng gets one of its earliest outings as a literary language. In the same spirit, the editor of Kwani?, Binyavanga Wainaina, has celebrated the visual art of matatus, intricately customized vehicles whose paintwork is startling enough to cause a traffic accident. 'Brash, garish public transport vehicles,' he calls them, 'so irritating to every Kenyan except those who own one, or work for one'. On the streets of Nairobi the turnboys hang from the doors of matatus, half-cut on miraa (the stimulant leaf favoured by Somalis, grown in central Kenya), calling out destinations at the stopping points and cramming passengers into the vehicle until the wheels splay outward and the transmission hangs a few inches from the ground. Herds of these matatus careen around Nairobi with cool disregard for other road users. It is hard not to be struck by them, or be struck down while trying to make out the intricate typography of the slogans that bedeck them: HARD TARGET, SWEET BABY, HAPPINESS, SLANDER, DOWN WITH HOMEBOYS, TOLERANCE OF LADIES, DESTINATION. And, seeming to confirm the upbeat conclusion of the Commission for Africa, NO CONDITION PERMANENT. Another Kenyan commentator, Joyce Nyairo, compares the traffic in Nairobi to music. Matatus, she says, are jazz.

African music, like language, has been the site of endless mutation, within Africa and beyond. It is Africa's most triumphant export. Jal's Nilotic hip-hop and his duets with Abdel Gadir Salim are just one expression of an inexhaustible hybridity that has had the peoples of northern countries dancing to an African beat since the late nineteenth century. Music is where the traditions of Europe and African meet on equal terms. As the musicologist Stephen Brown puts it:

'One of the most important events of the twentieth century was the marriage of African and European musical languages. It wasn't just one marriage, but a series of marriages—in the American South, in Cuba, in Jamaica, in Brazil, and, of course, Africa. There is something about each of the two music cultures that seems to need the other… European music provided harmonic progressions organized round a tonal centre—an idea which, once you've heard it, is irresistible. African music offered its polyrhythms, rhythms that occur in layers—a kind of beat which, once heard, is hard to live without.'

Hard to live without. Africa is part of everyone's life, whether they know it or not. Along with ivory, slaves, diamonds, gold and oil, it has given us the soundtrack of modernity. And—here is one generalization it is safe to make—Africa is where we come from. Our ancestral home is in the Rift Valley, somewhere between Nairobi and the Red Sea. This is worth remembering: if it were not for Africa we would not be here at all.

The Tour d’Afrique, Africa’s most grueling cycling odyssey, is set to roll out of Cairo this Saturday.

Kenyan peacemaker, Kalonzo Musyoka, who mediated the Sudan and Somalia crises for 10 years, has established a foundation to foster democracy and conflict resolution across Africa.

Madagascar has reached a milestone in its ambitious plan to treble its nature parks by the end of 2008, by already protecting one million extra hectares, an international conservation group claimed yesterday.

Trade volumes between Africa’s 53 nations and the People’s Republic of China jumped by $US7 billion to reach a new record high in the 2005 calendar year.

Hot on the heels of Liberia’s election of a female leader - a first for Africa - new Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete has sniffed the winds of change and nearly doubled the number of women in his cabinet and deputy ministry.