A sequel to the late Nelson’s Mandela’s autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom is to be published in South Africa next year, the former president’s foundation said on Wednesday.
The book titled The Presidential Years, which Mandela began writing in 1998, will be based on his five years in office.
He had already drafted 10 chapters “when he finally ran out of steam” in 2002, said the foundation which has released a handwritten manuscript of the opening sentences of the book.
“The book will be based on the 10 chapters written by Mandela himself,” Danielle Melville, the spokesperson for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, told AFP.
She did not say who has been brought in to finish the book.
The foundation, which oversees the legacy of South Africa’s first black president said it had “embarked on a project to see the completion of ‘The Presidential Years’ as an authorised account of Mr Mandela’s presidency.”
The hand-written draft opens with a poignant passage: “Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names. It would seem that they never existed at all.”
Mandela died a year ago at the age of 95 after a long illness.
His first internationally acclaimed autobiography published in 1995 has been translated into numerous languages and adapted into an award-winning film.
Mandela left instructions for the draft to be handed to five of his comrades for comments, including President Jacob Zuma, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj, who was also jailed with Mandela on Robben Island.
The internationally revered anti-apartheid hero spent 27 years in prison before coming out to lead South Africa after the fall of apartheid in 1994.
He only served a single five-year term as president, stepping down from office in 1999 having laid the foundation for a united South Africa.
Mention northern Nigeria and the first thing that may spring to mind is Boko Haram. Zainab Ashadu is hoping to change that — by selling designer handbags.
The Nigerian designer is the brains behind the Zashadu brand, whose modern, colourful creations use the ancient art of tanning and leather-dyeing from the country’s north.
“I think people like the story behind the bags. They like the fact that the bag has roots and origins,” the 32-year-old told AFP at her bustling workshop in a working class district of Lagos.
Zainab Ashadu poses with her creations at her workshop in Lagos. (Pic: AFP)
From the cramped premises in Festac, which buzzes with the sound of Singer sewing machines, a team of about half a dozen artisans make between 200 and 300 bags every year.
Ashadu’s parents were from the north, which is these days rarely out of the news because of the Islamist insurgency that has been raging since 2009.
But the region has long been known for its high-quality leather, which the designer turns into clutch purses and handbags that sell overseas for between 150 – 800 euros.
The leather comes from the north’s biggest city, Kano, goatskin from the ancient northwestern city of Sokoto as well as python skin from snake farms in the region.
Sustainability, know-how Unlike European fashion houses, which import raw leather from Nigeria and then tan and dye it overseas, Ashadu decided to make use of the centuries of know-how of artisans in Kano.
“It is very important for me to work in a sustainable way,” she said.
“I work with small families of tanners, the animals are traceable, we use vegetable dyes and other environmentally friendly dyes, and also the dyers work all together to save energy.”
The designer gets her inspiration from hours of hunting for bargains in the maze of stalls in the huge Mushin market, in the Lagos suburbs.
The market sells Nigerian leather off-cuts and rejects, particularly from Italian fashion houses.
“It’s so vibrant… there’s so much leather available and sometimes the sellers have no idea of the quality of what they sell,” said Ashadu.
“There’s antelope – that is very soft – there’s goatskin, sheepskin…”
From there, the material is turned into bags by her team, all of whom have been trained at a specialist school of leatherwork in the northern city of Zaria.
Adaptability Ashadu is one of an increasing number of returning Nigerians or “repats”, chancing their arm in their home country after years spent overseas.
She spent her early childhood years in Lagos but was a teenager in London, where she was variously a model, actress, buyer and architecture student.
She came back in 2010 and has had to adapt to a different way of doing business.
“You need to be tough-skinned, adaptable and to have a great sense of humour,” she said.
“Nigeria is a very hard place to… do anything, let’s put it that way. It’s definitely very hard to run a business. But it’s more earthy. You feel like your feet are on the ground.”
Understanding and adapting to a different style of doing business is key to getting ahead, with some overseas firms looking to invest in Nigeria put off by red tape and logistical constraints.
Power cuts that often last more than 12 hours are a major problem and force businesses to invest in huge, costly electricity generators.
At Ashadu’s workshop, in a modest house belonging to her family, power comes from a small generator.
What’s important is adapting as much as possible to how her employees work, rather than trying to apply to the letter what she learnt at the London College of Fashion.
‘Made in Africa’ Zashadu bags have won a small but loyal following locally. Private sales have been held in unexpected locations such as a hotel suite with champagne and macaroons and at an upmarket yacht club.
(Pic: Zashadu / Facebook)
In the last year, the brand, which is marketed online abroad, has established a presence in boutiques in London, Miami, Dublin, Johannesburg and most recently in Paris.
French designer Charlotte Ziegler, who sells Zashadu bags at the Franck et Fils department store, said she was intrigued by Ashadu’s unusual profile and also its “sustainable luxury”.
But she admits it was a risk.
“For 200 or 400 euros, people sometimes prefer to buy a product with a (recognised) designer label,” she said.
Ashadu is confident and knows that she’s tapped into a trend.
“People love Africa and Africa is something that is new in this way and people love to jump on bandwagons,” she said.
“And this one ticks all the boxes: it’s made in Africa, it’s beautiful-looking, it’s made sustainably, it’s international.”
A health worker gives a drink to a young Ebola patient at the Kenama treatment centre run by the Red Cross Society. (Pic: AFP)
Junior doctors at Sierra Leone’s main hospital went on strike on Monday in protest over inadequate equipment to fight the Ebola epidemic ravaging the impoverished nation.
The action at Freetown’s Connaught Hospital follows the deaths of three doctors in two days, with new figures showing Sierra Leone has overtaken Liberia as the country with the most infections.
“We have decided to withhold our services until proper and more conducive atmosphere is created for us to continue our work,” the Junior Doctors Association said in statement.
The association did not say how many doctors were joining the action, but patients were reporting significant disruptions as senior consultants headed to the wards to cover their work.
One junior told AFP she and her colleagues were “depressed” and “losing courage to turn up for work” because of the lack of equipment.
“We are also worried over the deaths of our colleagues… which is very disheartening,” she said.
The doctors say they don’t have enough respiratory machines and vital signs monitors, and that intensive care facilities are lacking in an Italian-built treatment centre in the west of the city to which some them are due to be sent.
A source at the Junior Doctors Association said the union would meet on Tuesday to decide whether to continue the action.
The World Health Organisation published new figures on Monday showing that Sierra Leone was registering the most cases in west Africa, for the first time, with 7 798 cases compared with Liberia’s 7 719.
Sierra Leone has recorded around 1 742 Ebola deaths this year and has registered a worrying surge recently of cases in its western area, including the capital.
Ten Sierra Leonean doctors have died after contracting Ebola.
Aiah Solomon Konoyima’s death late on Saturday at an Ebola treatment unit in Hastings, near the capital Freetown, came just a day after two of his colleagues were killed by the virus.
Even before the Ebola epidemic spread from Guinea in May, Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries, was still struggling to rebuild its health services after a decade-long civil war in the 1990s.
In 2010 the nation was estimated to have around one doctor for every 50 000 people – or roughly 120 doctors for the entire country.
The doctors are among more than 300 healthcare workers to have died treating patients infected in the deadly outbreak, which appears to be stabilising in Guinea and Liberia but is still spreading at an alarming rate in Sierra Leone.
The virus is spread through contact with bodily fluids, meaning healthcare workers are particularly at risk, and more than 100 have lost their lives in Sierra Leone.
The outbreak has left more than 6 300 people dead worldwide since December 2013, nearly all in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
A Zambian HIV counsellor looks at text messages coming up on the U-report platform for HIV and Aids awareness at a call centre in Lusaka. (Pic: AFP)
The questions teenagers ask about HIV are brutally honest, anonymous – and sent in 160 characters or less over mobile phone text messages.
At U-Report, a Zambian HIV advice organisation, thousands of bite-sized questions come through every day.
One asks, “I have a girl who has HIV and now she is talking about marriage what can I do with her?”
Another wants to know “when you kiss someone deeply can it be possible to contract the virus?”
Though Aids-related deaths are significantly decreasing internationally, they continue to rise among adolescents, according to a Unicef report released last week.
But services like U-Report are offering a new way to get through to teens too afraid or too embarrassed to talk to health care workers face-to-face.
Located in a nondescript office building in Lusaka, the counsellors sit behind desktop computers answering SMS queries on everything from how the virus is spread, to the pros and cons of male circumcision.
Launched in 2012, the service now boasts over 70 000 subscribers and is being used as a model for other countries, including South Africa and Tanzania.
“We are receiving messages from all over Zambia,” said manager Christina Mutale. “It went viral.”
Significantly, a third of participants are teens, those most likely to die from Aids.
Sitting in a garden outside the Lusaka clinic where she receives her treatment, U-Report user Chilufya Mwanangumbi said counsellors could be hard to find.
High infection rate With purple-painted nails and dreams of being a civil engineer, the 19-year-old student is one of Zambia’s many teenagers living with HIV.
“At other clinics, they don’t tell you what to do, they just tell you you’re positive and send you home with the drugs,” said Mwanangumbi.
“That’s when people kill themselves – because they think it’s the end of the world.”
UNAIids, the UN agency battling the disease, estimates 2.1 million adolescents are living with HIV in 2013, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Zambia has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world – an estimated 13 percent of its 14 million people are infected.
Signs of the epidemic are everywhere.
In the Saturday Post newspaper nearly half of the classifieds section is filled with adverts for herbal cures for HIV and Aids, alongside remedies for wide hips and reclaiming lost lovers.
And while U-Report is starting to address the teenage HIV crisis, the barriers to success in the country are high. Even if teens get access to counselling, they may struggle to find a suitable clinic in Zambia, where there is a chronic shortage of doctors and health workers.
Medical services and technology Yet there has never been a better time for a mobile phoned-based counselling service.
By the end of 2014, there will be more than 635 million mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa, a number set to grow as phones become cheaper and data more readily available, said Swedish technology company Ericsson in a recent report.
Zambia’s text message experiment is part of an international trend that is seeing medical services being provided via technology, with digitally savvy teens the quickest to adapt.
“The long-term findings on adolescents, health care and computer technologies is that they often prefer them to face-to-face communication,” said Kevin Patrick, director at the Centre for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the University of California, San Diego.
“They will more likely confide in a computer about sensitive issues.”
And as Zambia wrestles to shore up its overwhelmed health care system, inexpensive mobile technology could help ease the strain.
“Apps exist to help people locate the closest HIV testing site,” said David Moore, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, researching mobile technologies and HIV. “What if you could do something like an HIV rapid test using an app on your phone? That could be a game changer in terms of HIV incidence.”
Voting began on Friday in Namibia’s presidential and legislative elections, in an election that is expected to see the ruling South West People’s Organisation (Swapo) party retain power in the country it has run since independence 24 years ago.
Voters at Katutura township, outside the capital Windhoek, formed long lines before daybreak, including some first-time “born free” voters -those born after independence in 1990.
“It’s a rich country with poor people, so I hope there is more balance,” said 43-year-old Elias while waiting to cast his vote.
Although he expects the ruling Swapo to win, he wants to see a more opposition parliamentarians challenge the long-party’s 24 year grip on power.
Polls opened at 7am local time and will close around 14 hours later in the latest closing stations.
Some had waited patiently in line since 4am in the cool morning air, with steaming thermoses full of coffee and tea.
The country’s fifth election since independence is billed as the first e-vote in Africa, with 1.2 million people expected to cast their ballots electronically.
After the polls opened, voting was initially slow, as presiding officers at Katutura rolled out the new electronic voting system. But things quickly sped up.
“Once it starts, it’s fast,” said one of the voters exiting the polling booth.
On entry to the polling station, electoral officers checked voting cards against the voters roll as well as the thumb for signs of indelible ink indicating the person has already voted.
The voters cast their ballots for presidential and parliamentary candidates on separate machines, chunky slabs of green and white plastic with the names and images of candidates and their party affiliation that make a loud beep after each vote.
“The younger people get it first time, but the older ones you have to explain a little,” said presiding officer Hertha Erastus.
Opposition parties had launched an 11th-hour court challenge to stop the vote from going ahead, saying the use of Indian-made e-voting machines could facilitate vote rigging. The High Court in Windhoek dismissed the case.
President Hifikepunye Pohamba who has served a maximum two five-year terms in office steps down after the vote and is likely to be succeeded by Prime Minister Hage Geingob, if Swapo wins the election.
The liberation movement won 75 percent of the vote in the last election, but the party has seen increased criticism of the slow pace of land reform as well as allegations of government corruption.
