A woman dubbed the “wedding thief” after carrying out a string of audacious robberies has been convicted in Ghana of stealing £5 000 from a couple at their wedding reception.
Emelia Appiah, described as a specialist in wedding thefts, stole cash gifts from a newly married couple in the west African country’s capital city by impersonating a member of the team in charge of the gift table.
In an audacious move, Appiah is reported to have gone to the bride’s house on the morning of the wedding in April under the pretence of being part of the team to dress her. The prosecutor, Inspector K Nyadikor, told the Accra circuit court Appiah was turned away because the bride was already dressed.
Nyadikor said Appiah later followed her to the church where the wedding was taking place in South La – a residential area in Accra – and impersonated another woman who was part of the team in charge of the gift table.
Church clerks, fooled by Appiah’s impersonation, then gave her access to the gifts, including envelopes containing £5 000 cash.
Appiah is believed to have used a similar tactic on several previous occasions, including one wedding where she impersonated a wedding planner.
Wedding gifts. (Pic: Flickr / Matthew Nenninger)
Cash gifts and large, fluid guest lists are common at Ghanaian weddings, making them attractive targets for creative thieves.
In January Nana Sakyi Essel (18) was arrested at a wedding in Kumasi, capital of Ghana’s Ashanti region, wearing a grey suit and presenting himself to the bride’s family as one of the groom’s cousins in charge of the gifts, until he aroused one of the guests’ suspicions and the police were called.
He was later discovered to have stolen from at least one previous wedding in the city.
In 2010 Francis Degraft Johnson (26) stole about £500 from his friend’s wedding after he was asked to deposit the gifts in a bedroom at the wedding reception but made off with the cash instead.
Three mannequins stained with fake blood were dumped last week outside a town hall where Cécile Kyenge was due to make a speech, the latest in a stream of racist protests and insults aimed by furious Italians at the country’s first black government minister.
After being likened to an orangutan by a former government minister and having bananas thrown at her while on a podium, it is getting tougher for Congo-born Kyenge (49), to keep up her oft-repeated mantra that Italy is a tolerant country – but she is trying hard.
“I have never said Italy is racist, every country needs to start building awareness of immigration and Italy has simply arrived very late,” she said on the day the mannequins were discovered.
Cécile Kyenge. (Pic: AFP)
Judging by the venom directed at Kyenge since she was named minister for integration in April, Italy needs to do some fast catching up as the ranks of foreign residents in the country swell to around four million, about 7% of the population.
But from her office in Rome, Kyenge insisted that children growing up in Italy’s burgeoning melting pot are free from the prejudices of their parents. “It’s easier for the young who have grown up with a different mentality, who have come across people from other places,” she said. “If you ask a child in a class who is their friend, it is more likely he will say ‘the one with the green jumper’ rather than ‘the black one’.”
That is not quite how Forza Nuova, the far-right party that left the Ku Klux Klan-style mannequins at the town hall, sees things. Kyenge’s work on behalf of immigrants, said party member Pablo de Luca, was aimed at “the destruction of the national identity”.
Such views are keenly shared by members of the Northern League, Italy’s anti-immigrant party, which propped up Silvio Berlusconi’s government until it collapsed in 2011.
MEP Mario Borghezio set the ball rolling in May by claiming that Kyenge would impose “tribal conditions” on Italy and help form a “bongo-bongo” administration. Africans, he added for good measure, had “not produced great genes”.
Public insults In June, a local councillor for the party called for Kyenge to be raped, while in July Roberto Calderoli, a party member and former Berlusconi minister, compared her to an orangutan before bananas were lobbed at her as she made a speech.
To top a vituperative summer, a rightwing deputy mayor in Liguria compared Kyenge on his Facebook page to the prostitutes – often African – who line a local road, while a well-known Italian winemaker, Fulvio Bressan, shocked wine lovers by reportedly calling Kyenge a “dirty black monkey”.
It has been a tough reception for a woman who moved to Italy to work as a home help while she trained to become an ophthalmologist, marrying an Italian man and plunging into local politics in Modena to push for greater rights for immigrants before winning a seat in parliament in February.
“When I arrived in 1983, I was one of the few; I was a curiosity. Then, in the 1990s, when mass immigration started, immigrants began to be seen as a threat,” she said, recalling patients who had refused to be visited by her. “The process needed to be accompanied by more information in the media, in schools, better laws.”
A shock survey in 2008 found that when people were asked who they found “barely likeable or not likeable at all”, 81% of Italians mentioned Gypsies, 61% said Arabs, 64% said Romanians and 74% opted for Albanians.
Then came the crippling economic downturn, which sliced 15% off Italy’s manufacturing sector, pushed the unemployment rate up to 12% and further hardened perceptions of “job-stealing” migrants.
Citizenship law What is really upsetting the Northern League is Kyenge’s work to overhaul Italy’s citizenship law, which currently forces the children of migrants born in Italy to wait until they are 18 before they can apply to become Italians, leaving a generation of children growing up feeling like Italians, talking local dialects like Italians, but unable to be Italian.
It has been dubbed the “Balotelli generation”, after black footballer Mario Balotelli – who was born to Ghanaian parents in Sicily and is now a mainstay in the Italian national team, but has faced stadium chants of “a negro cannot be Italian”.
Kyenge points out that she is not pushing for a US-style law that hands a passport to anyone born in the country, but for a toned-down version that would require the child’s parents to have spent some time in Italy or to have taken integration courses.
Meanwhile, she has backed new measures simplifying the bureaucratic nightmare faced by the children of immigrants, who have one year to complete a blizzard of paperwork needed to gain a passport when they turn 18. “You have from the age of 18 to 19 to apply and requests are often turned down due to a few missing documents,” she said.
It is just part of an ambitious programme to which the soft-spoken Kyenge has committed herself, stretching from working on housing issues for nomad families to inter-religious dialogue designed to make it easier for Italians to adopt overseas.
Her key task, she said, is convincing a country that has no shortage of culture – from its food to its art – that there is always room for more. “Diversity, sharing something you don’t have, offers a huge amount,” she said.
Turning to her own field, medicine, she said: “There are small examples of foreign customs which are being adopted by hospitals, like carrying your baby on your back, which can help children with ankle ailments as well as increasing physical contact with the parent while helping the posture of the parent.”
Critics have rounded on the fact that Kyenge’s father was polygamous, fathering 38 children by numerous wives, a custom she said she would not trying to encourage in Italy. “Let’s be clear,” she said, laughing, “this is a form of marriage I don’t agree with.”
Rather than threatening Italian traditions, Kyenge said the asylum-seekers now heading for Italy from sub-Saharan Africa and Syria could be taught to revive trades now being abandoned by Italians, especially if they were allowed to set up shop in the medieval hilltop villages that are rapidly being abandoned up and down the country.
Take, for example, the Calabrian town of Riace, which has reversed depopulation by welcoming the migrants landing on rickety boats after a perilous Mediterranean crossing and setting them up in trades such as dressmaking, joinery, pottery or glass-blowing.
“This is a good practice, using depopulated villages where there are many empty houses, where old farms, shops and workshops can be reopened,” said Kyenge, who visited Riace in August. “It offers a welcome to migrants, it’s good for the national economy and good for saving trades that risk disappearing.”
Back in Rome, as she works to get her message across, Kyenge is getting ready to dodge the next bunch of bananas as she continues to insist that Italy is not a racist country, just learning fast.
“Balotelli and I are both opening new paths in our fields,” she said, “and anyone who does that will face huge difficulties.”
“Is it a crime now, being an immigrant?” asks Eric Williams, a Cameroonian living in Rabat, where the murder of a Senegalese man has stoked fears among Morocco’s sub-Saharan community.
On August 12, Ismaila Faye (31) was stabbed to death near the capital’s central bus station during an argument with a Moroccan over seating, according to the preliminary investigation.
Local media highlighted the racist nature of the attack, sparking concerns of a rise in hostile behaviour towards black Africans, many of whom pass through Morocco illegally in their quest to reach Europe and a new life.
A week after the murder, hundreds of mostly Senegalese immigrants gathered outside the morgue in Rabat to pay homage to the victim and protest against racism.
A Senegalese man follows the hearse carrying the body of Ismaila Faye during his funeral procession in the Moroccan capital on August 19 2013. (Pic: AFP)
Moroccans have also been active on social media to denounce violence against the African community.
Just a stone’s throw from Spain, Morocco has increasingly become a permanent home for sub-Saharans seeking a better life in Europe but unable to get there, with local NGOs putting the estimated number of them at more than 20 000.
But their coexistence with Moroccans is often fraught with difficulty.
Earlier in the summer, notices appeared in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, baldly stating that sub-Saharan immigrants were barred from renting certain properties.
“Our situation is really bad. Nearly 15 immigrants were attacked in just one week,” says Williams, who heads an anti-racism group in Morocco.
“There needs to be a racist murder for people to take our problems seriously,” he adds.
Williams says some Moroccans are fundamentally opposed to their presence, which they see as a threat to their jobs, in a city where unemployed youths stage regular street protests demanding work.
In Morocco’s main cities, sub-Saharan women are often to be found begging at the side of the road, while young men try to peddle their wares, selling anything from cheap watches to polished wood carvings.
“I don’t understand why some Moroccans treat Africans in a contemptuous way. Coming here I thought I would be in a neighbourly country, a brother country,” Williams says.
Anna Bayns, a Senegalese student at Rabat University, agrees that violence against the sub-Saharan community is on the rise, even if there are no official statistics to prove it.
“We are often referred to as ‘negroes’,” she said.
‘Like slaves’ In the poor neighbourhood of Takadoum, six immigrants, most of them from Cameroon, share a small room which gets stiflingly hot during the summer, and together they struggle to make ends meet in a sometimes hostile environment.
“We are treated like slaves,” says one.
In the informal sector, workers get paid a pittance, less than five euros a day, he says, and finding accommodation is difficult.
Without a rental contract, the migrants are dependent on the goodwill of their often unscrupulous landlords.
“For this room, which is normally rented for 500 dirhams [47 euros], we pay 1 500 dirhams!” says another resident.
Senegalese immigrants and Moroccan children sit in front of a building where they rent flats in the Takaddum neighbourhood of Rabat. (Pic: AFP)
Several months ago, medical aid group Doctors Without Borders raised the alarm over increased violence by the authorities against illegal migrants, and announced that it was closing its projects in Morocco in protest.
Contacted by AFP, the head of migration and border control at the interior ministry, Khalid Zerouali, insists that authorities’ main objective is to “protect citizens”, adding that their “[border] security strategy is directed against criminal networks” and no one else.
“Our African brothers are welcome, but within the law.”
The European Union, with whom Rabat enjoys “advanced status” relations and which is the favoured destination of most African migrants in Morocco, is following the situation closely.
“We are obviously concerned about the reports that we have concerning the poor treatment of illegal migrants, mostly of sub-Saharan origin,” Rupert Joy, the EU ambassador to Morocco, told AFP.
“In my opinion the worst mistake one could make would be to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and that it isn’t serious,” he said.
Simon Kamau (26) has been in almost constant pain since he was a playful three-year-old and accidentally pierced his eye with a sharp object, but smartphone technology now offers hope.
His family live in an impoverished part of rural Naivasha in Kenya’s Rift Valley region and could not afford the 80km journey to the nearest specialist hospital, leaving the young Kamau blind in one eye ever since.
Today, 23 years later, Kamau has a chance to better his quality of life thanks to a team of doctors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine armed with an innovative, low cost, smartphone solution.
“Kenya was a natural test location,” the project’s team leader, Dr Andrew Bastawrous, told AFP. “For a country with a population of more than 40 million, there are only 86 qualified eye doctors, 43 of whom are operating in the capital Nairobi.”
The equipment used in the study, which has been running for five years and is now in its final stages, is a smartphone with an add-on lens that scans the retina, plus an application to record the data.
A technician scans the eye of Mary Wambui with a smartphone application as she takes part in an ophthalmological study and examination. (Pic: AFP)
The technology is deceptively simple to use and relatively cheap: each ‘Eye-Phone’, as Bastawrous likes to call his invention, costs a few hundred euros, compared to a professional ophthalmoscope that costs tens of thousands of euros and weighs in at around 130kg.
Bastawrous said he hopes the ‘Nakuru Eye Disease Cohort Study’, which has done the rounds of 5 000 Kenyan patients, will one day revolutionise access to eye treatment for millions of low-income Africans who are suffering from eye disease and blindness.
With 80% of the cases of blindness considered curable or preventable, the potential impact is huge.
Data from each patient is uploaded to a team of specialists, who can come up with a diagnosis and advise on follow-up treatment. The results are also compared to tests taken with professional equipment to check the smartphone is a viable alternative.
Bastawrous says his ‘Eye-Phone’ has proved its worth, and can easily and accurately diagnose ailments including glaucoma, cataracts, myopia and long-sightedness.
Treatments range from prescription glasses and eye drops to complex surgery that is conducted once every two weeks at a hospital in Nakuru, the nearest big town. So far, up to 200 of the 5 000 people involved in the study have had surgery to correct various eye ailments.
Men have their eyes tested by technicians from the ‘Nakuru Eye Disease Cohort Study’. (Pic: AFP)
Kamau is among those expecting to receive surgery on his blind eye. While doctors say he is unlikely to recover his full vision because the injury was so long ago, they can at least stop the pain and swelling caused by the additional strain on his functioning eye.
“I can hardly do manual work around the farm. Once the sun shines, my eyes water and I feel a lot of pain,” said Kamau, who lives on a small farm with six family members.
Neighbour Mary Wambui (50) has had eye problems for 36 years but gave up on finding treatment because existing medical care was far too expensive. Instead, she settled for home remedies like placing a cold wet cloth over her eyes when the pain became unbearable.
“I was treated at the Kijabe Mission hospital but the follow-up visits became too expensive. I had to pay bus fares and then queue in the waiting room for the whole day, and then go back home without seeing a doctor,” she recalled.
She said Bastawrous’ project, in which the tests were carried out at her home, was a welcome relief.
“I do not like the feel of hospitals. Their process is long, laborious and costly but with this phone, I got to know of my diagnosis with just a click,” she said.
Bastawrous says the success of the smartphone meant it could soon be replicated in other poor areas of Kenya. He said the arid Turkana area, one of Kenya’s poorest regions, was next on the list.
It lets out a high-pitched scream as you enter, then a sneering laugh. It’s a walk-in vagina, a conceptual art installation that has South Africans wagging their fingers and scratching their heads.
When 30-year-old South African artist Reshma Chhiba was asked to produce artwork for a disused apartheid-era women’s jail in Johannesburg, she wanted to make a statement about women’s power.
What she came up with was a talking “yoni”, or vagina in India’s ancient language, Sanskrit.
“It’s a screaming vagina within a space that once contained women and stifled women,” she told AFP. “It’s revolting against this space… mocking this space, by laughing at it.”
Visitors enter the 12m red padded velvet and cotton canal by first stepping onto a tongue-like padding. Thick, black acrylic wool mimics pubic hair around the opening.
A view of the art installation “Giant Walk-In Vagina” installed at a former women’s prison by artist Reshma Chhiba in Johannesburg. (Pic: AFP)
The shrill soundtrack that assaults visitors as they stroll through the tunnel is a revolt against the women’s jail, built in 1909, that held some of South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid activists.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was incarcerated there twice in 1958 and 1976.
“I definitely did not make this work for the sake of controversy,” said Chhiba.
For her, it was about artistic freedom and challenging deeply entrenched patriarchal systems .
“You don’t often hear men talking about their private parts and feeling disgust or shamed,” as women often do, she said.
“And that alone speaks volumes of how we’ve been brought up to think about our bodies, and what I am saying here is that it’s supposed to be an empowering space.”
The artist also wanted to address the scourge of rape in South Africa, where nearly 65 000 attacks on girls and women are reported a year in one of the highest incidences of rape in the world – with little improvement.
But the installation, on display throughout August, has collided with some sensitive cultural and religious taboos.
“It’s the most private part of my body. I grew up in the rural areas, we were taught not to expose your body, even your thighs let alone your vagina,” said Benathi Mangqaaleza, 24-year-old female security guard at the former prison that is now a tourist site.
“I think it’s pornographic, I think they have gone too far.”
‘A sacred space’ Twenty-four-year-old gardener Andile Wayi thought the exhibition — on the site of the Victorian-era brick women’s jail and another that once held Mahatma Gandhi – as well as the Constitutional Court – was wrong.
“The [Constitution] Hill is respected, it’s a heritage,” he said.
The fine arts graduate,who is also a practising Hindu, has spent years of research into the Hindu goddess Kali whom she views as a symbol of defiance.
She expressed “shock” at the media onslaught and allegations of blasphemy from some Hindu followers who complained through radio talk shows.
“To talk about the vagina, or visualise it, is something that is not out of the ordinary,” she insisted
The exhibition, entitled “The Two Talking Yonis”, was the product of two years of discussion with curator Nontobeko Ntombela on the mythology of female power in patriarchal systems.
Visitors have to take off their shoes to walk through the softly cushioned canal.
“By talking off your shoes, essentially you are respecting it, making it a divine space, a sacred space,” said Chhiba.
Gender Links, a lobby group promoting gender equality in southern Africa, praises Chhiba’s artwork for re-igniting discussion on a subject normally avoided.
“It is bringing the private into the public, that the woman’s body is not necessarily a private matter,” said Kubi Rama, Gender Links boss.
