“If you watch cartoons these days you get this depressing feeling that it’s all been done before and it’s not new, and I think my idea takes a different angle. And how many movies do you get by an African screenwriter? How many cartoons do you get by an African screenwriter? I think Africa is a market that the West needs to tap into right now. ” – Mirirai Moyo, on why she wants her story, Belonging made into an animated film.

She went on to say:

“The government gives so much money for soccer or sports events and this is only 90 minutes and then it’s over. You invest in art, literature, for example, lasts forever. The government needs to invest in the arts. There are so many kids out there who can write. One of the things that I find frustrating is the way people treat writing like a hobby. I was watching a movie with a friend, and at some point the main character says he’s a writer and the old lady who lives upstairs goes; “Isn’t that a hobby?” then my friend says ‘Yah, but I’ve always thought it’s a hobby’. But I’m like you think that at some point I’m going to fold up my books and do something serious, are you implying that this is not serious?’

We need to appreciate that people can make a living from art. Not everybody wants to be a professor, or lecturer or an accountant. People want to do different things and we need to invest in the creative industry. And you know ZIFA has got ZIFA village, all they need to do is start a writer’s village somewhere. I mean why is it that they don’t want to invest in the arts? What are they afraid of?”

- Mirirai Moyo on government investment in the arts

Black History Month is the month set aside to honor the past achievements and on-going contributions of African-Americans and people of African descent.  The theme for this year is African-Americans and the Civil War.   The U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Section invites you to celebrate Black History Month through video screenings of a selection of videos from the 19th Century through the civil rights to present day.  The screenings will be followed by a 30 minute Q&A facilitated by Assistant Public Affairs Officer, Andrew Posner.  Tea & Coffee will be served.

Thursday, February 3
Film: Fredrick Douglass Biography
Time: 1500 hrs
Venue: PAS Auditorium, 7th Floor Goldbridge,
Eastgate Mall, 3rd Street & R, Mugabe Way

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Synopsis
As a young man, he experienced the brutality of slavery first and as an outspoken leader of the abolitionist movement, he became one of the most powerful voices in America. This inspiring biography chronicles Douglass’ remarkable life: from his childhood in slavery to his crucial work on behalf of former slaves following the civil war.

Thursday, February 10
Film: Sound Track for a Revolution
Time: 1500 hrs
Venue: PAS Auditorium, 7th Floor Goldbridge,
Eastgate Mall, 3rd Street & R, Mugabe Way

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Synopsis: Tells the story of America’s civil rights movement through the freedom songs that protesters sang as they fought for justice and equality- with performances by John Legend, Wyclef Jean and others.
www.soundtrackforarevolution.com

Thursday, February 17
Film Neshoba
Time 1500 hrs
Venue: PAS Auditorium, 7th Floor Goldbridge,
Eastgate Mall, 3rd Street & R, Mugabe Way

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Synopsis: The story of a Mississippi town still divided about the meaning of justice 40 years
after the murders of three civil rights workers, the film explores whether healing and
reconciliation are possible and demonstrates how Americans move beyond scars of the past.
www.neshobafilm.com

Thursday, February 24
Film: Trouble The Water
Time: 1500 hrs
Venue: PAS Auditorium, 7th Floor Goldbridge,
Eastgate Mall, 3rd Street & R, Mugabe Way

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Synopsis: A young African American couple survive the flooding of New Orleans, failed levees, bungling bureaucrats and their own less than perfect past and manage to endure through love, hope and courage.
www.troublethewaterfilm.com

Yesterday I had a treat, listening to poems recited by members of the Zimbabwe Poets for Human Rights (ZPHR). The forum was in line with celebrating Black History Month, which is in February each year. In Zimbabwe, ZPHR will be celebrating Black History Month under the theme, “Black Poetry and the Struggle for Black Self-determination.” Poetry has the power to motivate, give confidence, and lift us up during difficult times so its an important communication device.

Members of ZPHR performed three poems from American poets. These were then open to the forum for discussion. The poems recited were Maya Angelou – Still I Rise, Gwendolyn Brooks – Say to them and Sir John Betjeman – Diary of a Church Mouse. Betjeman’s poem was much debated as the audience sought to contextualise it’s meaning to Zimbabwe.

The local poets then took the stage to perform their own original poems. There is such talent out there and I left the forum truly acknowledging that ‘poetry is a verbal war for freedom”. Interestingly a poet performed a poem dedicated to Nelson Mandela who had been reported to be ill in the past week. The poem generally looked at the greatness of the celebrated hero. A poet named PSP performed his own poem titled, “Rhythm of Device, the System Suffers Violence”. It was a poet’s story of how they struggle each day. Almost all the poets performed poems that show their day-to-day struggles and inspirational ones on how they want to be vehicles for change. I was particularly moved by one gentleman who recited a poem entitled, “Zimbabwe has not come”. It was really thought provoking and it left me deeply in thought.

For more please make a date to listen to these poets as they celebrate Black History Month at The Book Café, on Saturday the 5th of February 2011 from 2pm to 5pm.

“The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”

Be inspired by John Scott-Railton:

When the Egyptian government blocked the Internet last week in response to demonstrators’ use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize mass rallies, it not only cut off communication between ordinary Egyptians — it also muted their dialogue with the rest of the world.

For John Scott-Railton, a graduate student at University of California-Los Angeles, that silence was a personal blow. He had been visiting Egypt since 2006, going over there to see a close friend, and as the country accelerated towards revolt, he had been following the news on the Internet. Suddenly his connection was gone.

So Scott-Railton decided that if Egyptians couldn’t communicate with the world, he would do it for them, and set out to replicate the cacophony of voices he had been so drawn to. Reaching out to friends in Egypt by telephone, he started gathering updates from different neighborhoods and posting them online at his Twitter account @Jan25voices, named for the day the protests began. When he heard that Egypt’s mobile-phone networks were likely to be shut down, he drew up a list of people he knew with landlines. Over the roughly 24 hours on Friday when cellular communications were turned off, many journalists struggled to file their stories on the protests. But anyone following Jan25voices knew what was going on. “Some of the updates I was getting were from people’s aunts standing at the window, holding their phone out so I could hear what was happening,” he says.

In an earlier age, Scott-Railton would have had no choice but to wait, perhaps as he searched the dial for mentions of the events in Egypt. Today, the 27-year-old Michigan native is in the middle of the information flow, one of a host of bloggers and Tweeters who are — in many cases — doing as much as professional journalists to deliver news the Egyptian government is struggling to contain.

Scott-Railton’s Twitter account lists him as having just over 4,000 followers, but that considerably understates his influence, as his tweets — which he posts at a rate of around 50 a day — are visible to all those who search for information on the protests. Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, subscribes to his posts, as do the editors of several other major news publications. And Scott-Railton says that the BBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal have all reached out to him for analysis or help finding Egyptians to interview. “In years past, the idea was that you could only understand the situation if you were on the ground,” says Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media at Columbia Journalism School in NYC, who has been tracking the developments in Egypt. “What we have learned though is that there is a real role for social media for people who are far away from the action to bring context, understanding and analysis.”

Scott-Railton, who speaks rudimentary Arabic and has mostly used English — and occasionally French — in his reporting, has no training as a journalist. And yet, “a lot of the questions of journalistic ethics are now on my mind,” he says. “How do you confirm information? How do you avoid echo chambers? How do you substantiate?” When new sources began emailing him after his initial postings, he insisted they provide contacts, preferably in the U.S., who could vouch for their identities. He says his goal is to provide the “human component” of the story, “to make it feel as exciting and as relevant as the pictures of tanks rolling around.”

Once, news organizations spent years, if not decades, building up institutional credibility so that their viewers felt comfortable trusting them. Scott-Railton has had a week. “I’ve definitely taken a side,” he says. “I’m tweeting the voices of protestors. It’s not like I’m tweeting the police. But the tone I’m trying to take is not breathless. I’m trying to be careful — especially because the medium pushes you in the other direction.”

“Can you hold on a second?” Scott-Railton interrupts our interview to share another scrap of news. “I have people [in the Middle East] watching different news networks and feeding me information,” he says. And indeed not much more than a second later, it’s there on his Twitter feed: “Arabeya [sic]: Closure of Egyptian Rail #Egypt #Jan25.” In the language of the uninitiated, he’s told all those watching Twitter for news on the protests that the Dubai-based Al Arabiya news channel has just reported that country’s rail-lines have been shut down.

Since he first set up Jan25voices, Scott-Railton has expanded his efforts, recruiting partners in Egypt and around the Middle East to monitor what the Arab-language news channels are reporting. Sometimes he doesn’t just post the information he receives from a phone call, but also the call itself. One recording of a young Egyptian talking to him from inside the protests has been listened to more than 275,000 times. “The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”

The December 2010/January 2011 issue of the Africa Report, included an article on 11 Ideas for 2011 to make real change. I read through the ideas and thought that the idea that suggests, “Nobody can become President over the age of 69″ was the best for me. I found it to be a low cost solution enabling freedom of choice among Africans benefiting the majority. I truly agree with the sentiment that says we appreciate the goodness that comes with ‘old wine’ – that is wisdom, experience and perspective. Surely our much older leaders in Africa deserve a round of applause for exhibiting these characteristics. However, having them in leadership positions for too long brings major discomfort to citizens as promises made go undelivered. Also when a leader stays in power for too long citizens begin to see their imperfections more clearly.

The pursuit of African leaders to stay in power even when the populace is no longer comfortable with them has proven not to be a general thing of late. This is evident with the protests in Tunisia and Egypt.  The anger brewing in the hearts of these citizens in these countries has been put in the limelight for the whole world to see. And the possibility of having other protests rising in other African countries cannot be ruled out. As Cameroon, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe go to vote in 2011 we hope to see a new age bracket of leaders govern our countries. Simply put, we want new faces in leadership positions.

We have to continue to pray and be patriotic towards our desired change in Africa. We truly desire to have selfless and visionary leaders at all levels of the government. There is a need also to have youths in leadership, as they are the future of tomorrow.

I conclude with a quote by Nelson Mandela, which says, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

Leaders will be more appreciated and recognized if they take steps towards these wise words.

In an op-ed for the New York Times Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin gives a personal account of the Egyptian protests:

ON Friday, the “day of rage,” I was in the streets with the protesters. Friends and I participated in a peaceful demonstration that started at the Amr Ibn al-As Mosque in Old Cairo near the Church of St. George. We set off chanting, “The people want the regime to fall!” and we were greeted with a torrent of tear gas fired by the police. We began to shout, “Peaceful, Peaceful,” trying to show the police that we were not hostile, we were demanding nothing but our liberty. That only increased their brutality. Fighting began to spread to the side streets in the ancient, largely Coptic neighborhood.

…Clearly, the scent of Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution” has quickly reached Egypt. Following the successful expulsion in Tunis of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the call arose on Facebook for an Egyptian revolution, to begin on Jan. 25. Yet the public here mocked those young people who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to post calls for protest: Since when was the spark of revolution ignited on a pre-planned date? Had revolution become like a romantic rendezvous?

…In Suez, where the demonstrations have been tremendously violent, live ammunition was used against civilians from the first day. A friend of mine who lives there sent me a message saying that, Thursday morning, the city looked as if it had emerged from a particularly brutal war: its streets were burned and destroyed, dead bodies were strewn everywhere; we would never know how many victims had fallen to the police bullets in Suez, my friend solemnly concluded.

After having escaped from Old Cairo on Friday, my friends and I headed for Tahrir Square, the focal point of the modern city and site of the largest protests. We joined another demonstration making its way through downtown, consisting mostly of young people. From a distance, we could hear the rumble of the protest in Tahrir Square, punctuated by the sounds of bullets and screams. Minute by painstaking minute, we protesters were gaining ground, and our numbers were growing. People shared Coca-Cola bottles, moistening their faces with soda to avoid the effects of tear gas. Some people wore masks, while others had sprinkled vinegar into their kaffiyehs.

Shopkeepers handed out bottles of mineral water to the protesters, and civilians distributed food periodically. Women and children leaned from windows and balconies, chanting with the dissidents. I will never forget the sight of an aristocratic woman driving through the narrow side streets in her luxurious car, urging the protesters to keep up their spirits, telling them that they would soon be joined by tens of thousands of other citizens arriving from different parts of the city.

…Hour by hour on Friday evening, the chaos increased. Police stations and offices of the ruling National Democratic Party were on fire across the country. I wept when news came that 3,000 volunteers had formed a human chain around the national museum to protect it from looting and vandalism. Those who do such things are certainly highly educated, cultivated people, neither vandals nor looters, as they are accused of being by those who have vandalized and looted Egypt for generations.

…Late Saturday, as I headed toward Corniche Street on the Nile River, I walked through a side street in the affluent Garden City neighbourhood, where I found a woman crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that her son, a worker at a luxury hotel, had been shot in the throat by a police bullet, despite not being a part of the demonstrations. He was now lying paralysed in a hospital bed, and she was on her way to the hotel to request medical leave for him. I embraced her, trying to console her, and she said through her tears, “We cannot be silent about what has happened. Silence is a crime. The blood of those who fell cannot be wasted.”

I agree. Silence is a crime. Even if the regime continues to bombard us with bullets and tear gas, continues to block Internet access and cut off our mobile phones, we will find ways to get our voices across to the world, to demand freedom and justice.