Kazungu Kassim (R), head of a Burundi albino association, listens to proceedings inside a courtroom in Ruyigi, eastern Burundi on May 28 2009. Prosecutors in Burundi asked for life sentences for three people on trial for allegedly murdering albinos to sell their body parts for use in witchcraft. (Pic: Reuters)
Eight people who appeared in court in Tanzania’s southern district of Mpanda on Thursday are charged with chopping a hand off an albino woman, a court official told AFP.
The victim, 30-year-old mother-of-four Remi Luchoma, was attacked in May and is still undergoing treatment in hospital, said state attorney Hongera Fimbo.
“The accused jointly and together committed the crime on May 14, at Mwamachoma village,” Fimbo said.
The accused pleaded not guilty and were remanded until July 15.
The attack occurred even after authorities in the East African nation launched a nationwide crackdown on witchdoctors, traditional healers and soothsayers.
In March, President Jakaya Kikwete said attacks against people with albinism, whose body parts are used for witchcraft and lucky charms, were “disgusting and a big embarrassment for the nation”.
At least 76 albinos have been murdered since 2000 with their dismembered body parts selling for around $600 and entire bodies fetching $75 000, according to United Nations experts.
Dozens more have survived having parts of their bodies hacked off while still alive.
Albinism is a hereditary genetic condition which causes a total absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes. It affects one Tanzanian in 1 400, often as a result of inbreeding, experts say.
Not long ago, dusk was a time of unease for the people of Magadi, a village in Kenya’s Kajiado County.
As the sun set, farmers began worrying about their cattle, easy prey for hyenas and leopards. Children lit fires to finish their schoolwork, filling homes with smoke.
Now as darkness falls, lights flick on across this sleepy hamlet, thanks to the efforts of more than 200 Maasai women at the frontline of a solar power revolution.
The women, trained in solar panel installation, use donkeys to haul their solar wares from home to home in the remote region, giving families their first access to clean and reliable power.
“For us, the impact of solar technology is unparalleled,” said Jackline Naiputa, who heads the Osopuko-Edonyinap group, one of the five women’s groups leading the alternative energy charge in the area.
Renewable energy developer Green Energy Africa provides the group with solar products – including solar panels, lights, and small rechargeable batteries – at a discount. The women sell the products at a profit of around 300 shillings ($3) each, which goes into the group’s account to buy more stock.
Naiputa, who in 2014 lost 10 goats to wild cats, said her teenage son used to spend cold nights in the cattle enclosure to guard their herd. Now, with solar lamps hanging around her homestead, Naiputa and her four children can sleep soundly in the warmth of their home.
“The light scares the hyenas away, so we don’t have to worry about losing our animals at night,” she said.
Women entrepreneurs The Women and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy Project (Werep), an initiative by Green Energy Africa, aims to turn Kajiado County to solar power by training women as solar installers and encouraging them to market the clean energy concept to fellow pastoralists.
The solar energy drive began in around November 2014, and so far about 2 000 households in the country have adopted solar technology. Barely seven months into the effort, the area has jumped from zero solar energy consumption in 2006, according to estimates by the government’s Arid Land Resource Management Project, to 20 percent today, energy experts say.
Compared with kerosene and firewood, the cost, convenience, and health benefits of solar are proving hard to resist.
“The nearest market where one can charge a cell phone or buy kerosene is 15 kilometres away, and it is only held one day a week,” Naiputa said.
Before going solar, her household used to spend 40 Kenyan shillings ($0.40) a day on kerosene and over 100 shilling ($1) a week charging the two family cell phones.
As well as saving villagers money, the switch to solar could help slow down the destruction of Kajiado County’s trees, which now cover just 1 percent of the area’s land, according to the National Environmental Management Authority.
And as more villagers choose clean solar energy over wood and coal to light and heat their homes, fewer will suffer the effects of inhaling the smoke that comes with their nightly fires. According to a 2014 World Health Organization report, household smoke was responsible for 1.6 million deaths worldwide.
Solar potential Edwin Kinyatti, the CEO of Green Energy Africa, said the uptake of solar energy was likely to continue “since it is affordable to most Kenyans,” even though cultural barriers, low literacy levels and difficult terrain had all presented some obstacles to the Kajiado County effort.
Even as the country’s middle class continues to grow, access to electricity remains low, with 68 percent of the population either too poor or too remote to connect to the national grid.
“Kenya has great potential for the use of solar energy throughout the year, thanks to its location near the equator,” said Lamarck Oyath, an energy expert and managing director at Lartech Africa Limited, a technology and consultancy firm. “Yet so far, the country gets less than 2 percent of its energy from solar power,” he said.
For villagers like Naiputa, however, solar is proving a big benefit – and not just because of the clean power it provides.
“Our community customs do not allow women to own any property,” she said. “But now women here own the solar technology, and it is something we are very happy about.”
Leopold Obi for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, covers humanitarian news, climate change, women’s rights, trafficking and corruption.
An orthopaedic technology specialist assembles a 3D-printed artificial limb at the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services Uganda (CORSU) in Wakiso. (Pic: AFP)
Doctors amputated Ugandan schoolboy Jesse Ayebazibwe’s right leg when he was hit by a truck while walking home from school three years ago.
Afterwards he was given crutches, but that was all, and so he hobbled about. “I liked playing like a normal kid before the accident,” the nine-year-old said.
Now an infrared scanner, a laptop and a pair of 3D printers are changing everything for Jesse and others like him, offering him the chance of a near-normal life.
“The process is quite short, that’s the beauty of the 3D printers,” said Moses Kaweesa, an orthopaedic technologist at Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services (CoRSU) in Uganda which, together with Canada’s University of Toronto and the charity Christian Blind Mission, is making the prostheses.
“Jesse was here yesterday, today he’s being fitted,” said Kaweesa, 34.
In the past, the all-important plaster cast sockets that connect prosthetic limbs to a person’s hip took about a week to make, and were often so uncomfortable people ended up not wearing them.
Plastic printed ones can be made in a day and are a closer, more comfortable fit.
The scanner, laptop and printer cost around $12 000, with the materials costing just $3.
Ayebazibwe got his first, old-style prosthesis last year but is now part of a trial that could lead to the 3D technology changing lives across the country.
Life-changing technology
The technology is only available to a few, however, and treatment for disability in Uganda in general remains woeful.
“There’s no support from the government for disabled people,” said Kaweesa. “We have a disability department and a minister for disabled people, but they don’t do anything.”
There are just 12 trained prosthetic technicians for over 250 000 children who have lost limbs, often due to fires or congenital diseases.
The 3D technology is portable and allows technicians to work on multiple patients at a time, increasing the reach of their life-changing intervention.
“You can travel with your laptop and scanner,” said Kaweesa, adding that the technology could be of great use in northern Uganda, a part of the country where many people lost limbs during decades of war between the government and Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, who specialised in chopping off limbs.
A picture taken on April 24 2015 shows lower-limb prostheses of a disabled child at the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services Uganda. (Pic: AFP)
After receiving his first 3D socket Ayebazibwe was overjoyed. “I felt good, like my normal leg,” he said. “I can do anything now – run and play football.”
The boy’s 53-year old grandmother, Florence Akoth, looks after him, even carrying him the two kilometres to school after his leg was crushed and his life shattered. She too is thrilled.
“Now he’s liked at school, plays, does work, collects firewood and water,” said Akoth, who struggles to make ends meet as a poorly-paid domestic worker caring for five children.
Sitting on a bench outside the CoRSU fitting room were three young children and their parents.
“This is her first time walking on two legs,” said Kaweesa, pointing at a timid young girl who lost both her legs in a fire.
“Because they’ve seen other kids walking, playing, they realise they’ve been missing that,” he said “Once you fit them they start walking and even running.”
October 31 2013: People displaced by fighting between the Congolese army and M23 rebels in Bunagana in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, make their way home. (Pic: Reuters)
Theatre director brings together mining companies, government officials and local residents to try to unravel one of the world’s most complicated wars.
No one knows exactly how many people have died in the past two decades in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but Milo Rau, a Swiss theatre director and journalist, puts the figure at six million.
No one is quite sure why conflict has raged either, thanks to the labyrinthine complexity of the region: the alphabet soup of armed groups, the seeming lack of ideology and the shadowy involvement of neighbouring countries and multinational corporations.
But Rau is determined to unravel at least some of these tangled threads. On May 29, he will begin staging an unprecedented event – part political inquiry, part verbatim theatre – in eastern Congo itself, hearing evidence from players on all sides of the ongoing tragedy.
“There are no huge battles, there is no Stalingrad,” he says, explaining why Congo defies the single story that headline writers crave.
“Instead you have massacres – like the one in Mutarule in which 35 people died last year – but they happen every day and, after 20 years, you have six million people dead and you don’t even have a trial. Through the tribunal we hope to simplify it and give it a human face.”
Costing 900 000 euros (£643,969), The Congo Tribunal will take place across six days starting on May 29, first in Bukavu, then later in June in Berlin, where in the 19th century the colonialist empires infamously gathered in a “scramble” to carve up Africa.
‘Nothing has changed’
It took a year to put together a “cast”, including Congolese government and opposition politicians, military officers and rebels, UN and World Bank mandarins and major mining companies, as well as ordinary Congolese citizens, philosophers, economists and lawyers who will all appear before an international jury.
Rau, 38, is determined that it will not merely be an exercise in western corporation-bashing, and should differ from the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam and Palestine – organised by Nobel-prize winning philosopher Bertrand Russell, and hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1960s.
“It’s not only leftwing people,” he continues, speaking from Bukavu via Skype. “We have an advocate of a huge mining company and an advocate of the government. We also try to see it from the neoliberal side. It’s necessary to have these minerals to produce the computers we’re talking on. But the most important people are the miners and the citizens to tell what has happened.”
Among these is Théophile Gakinz, a pastor from Bukavu. “The resources are badly divided,” he told Rau’s researchers. “A small group of people takes it all. The rest struggles in misery.”
The tribunal will grapple with the region’s ethnic, political and economic dividing lines. It will look at the implications of assimilating former rebels into the Congolese government army, whether the UN and NGOs in the region have become a “peacekeeping industry”, and what impact, if any, American legislation against conflict minerals has had on the ground.
Prince Kihangi, a civil society activist who will be on the jury in Bukavu, said: “The US wants to appear righteous to the rest of the world. Officially they say, hey, we need a law that shows the world that we impose a ban. That we are not involved in this mafia. But because at the same time we need those minerals we must find other ways.
“For us, all these initiatives are fit for nothing. Absolutely worthless. Nothing has changed.”
The investigations
This weekend the tribunal will first hear evidence about three local cases. One concerns the discovery of cassiterite [tin ore] on a hill in Bisie in 2002 that attracted numerous armed groups as well as the Congolese army, who walked away with most of the profits. Four years later a company acquired an exploration licence for the mine from the government, which led to an open conflict with the miners on the site.
A key question for the tribunal will be: “Does the industrial mining of the raw materials in Bisie contribute to the security and economical development of the region, or are the foreign mining companies the only ones who profit?”
“Has Banro profited from the political instability during the war in order to plunder the natural resources of eastern Congo, or are they pioneers of the industrialisation of the region?”
Peter Mugisho, a local activist, says in a promotional video for the tribunal: “After the re-localisation they find themselves in a situation with no access to running water, no access to health services and no access to food. This is a method to exterminate the population.”
The final case concerns a massacre in the village of Mutarule in June last year, resulting in 35 deaths. Although local authorities had repeatedly warned about increasing insecurity in the region, neither the nearby UN peacekeeping mission nor the Congolese army prevented the atrocity.
“Key question: Is there no end to the insecurity in eastern Congo because too many local and international players are involved in the numerous conflicts and profit from them, or do they in fact prevent something even worse?”
‘It’s up to us to protect ourselves’
The tribunal – backed by sponsors including the German and Swiss culture ministries – moves to Berlin from 26 to 28 June, where it will examine the involvement of the European Union, the World Bank, the international community and multinational corporations.
It will be filmed and turned into a documentary that will go on general release next year after a premiere at the Tata Raphael Stadium in Kinshasa – where heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974.
The project is a natural successor to Rau’s masterpiece Hate Radio, which reconstructs the broadcasting of a Rwandan radio station that combined pop music with propaganda that fuelled the 1994 genocide.
Sylvestre Bisimwa, chief investigator at the Bukavu hearings, says on the video: “People say to themselves: the state doesn’t protect us. It’s up to us to protect ourselves.
“The victims are left with their pain. They carry their burden alone,” he said.
“This tribunal will lead to a totally neutral and independent prosecution, and will form a base to fight exemption from punishment in Congo.”
A Kenyan lawyer has offered US president Barack Obama 50 cows and other assorted livestock in exchange for his 16-year-old daughter Malia’s hand in marriage, a report said on Tuesday.
Felix Kiprono said he was willing to pay 50 cows, 70 sheep and 30 goats in order to fulfil his dream of marrying the first daughter.
“I got interested in her in 2008,” Kiprono said, in an interview with The Nairobian newspaper.
At that time President Obama was running for office for the first time and Malia was a 10-year-old.
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t dated anyone since and promise to be faithful to her. I have shared this with my family and they are willing to help me raise the bride price,” he said.
Kiprono said he intended to put his offer of marriage to Obama and hopes the president will bring his daughter with him when he makes his first presidential visit to Kenya, the country where his father was born, in July.
Obama‘s Kenyan grandmother, who is in her early 90s, still lives in Kogelo, in western Kenya, home to a number of the president’s relatives.
“I am currently drafting a letter to Obama asking him to please have Malia accompany him for this trip. I hope the embassy will pass the letter to him,” he said.
Kiprono dismissed the notion he might be a gold-digger.
“People might say I am after the family’s money, which is not the case. My love is real,” he insisted.
The young lawyer, whose age was not revealed, said he had already planned his proposal, which would be made on a hill near his rural village, and the wedding at which champagne would be shunned in favour of a traditional sour milk called “mursik”.
Kiprono said that as a couple he and the young Obama would lead “a simple life”.
“I will teach Malia how to milk a cow, cook ugali (maize porridge) and prepare mursik like any other Kalenjin woman,” he said.
