Friday, August 31, 2018

Gabriel And The Mountain-A Young Brasilian Man's Last Days In Africa

As a couple, Cristina and Gabriel alternately bicker and show affection for each other in “Gabriel and the Mountain.”

Photo: Strand Releasing

“Gabriel and the Mountain” — a meandering yet fascinating account of a young traveler’s death in Africa — is a hybrid documentary-narrative with a twist: Actors play the two main roles, re-creating scenes with the real people who encountered the traveler in his final days.

It’s a conceit that works seamlessly, and the effect is often haunting, even if the narrative firepower fizzles in portions of the ambitious, beautifully photographed film.

Director Fellipe Barbosa begins the true story in 2009 on the lush slopes of Mount Mulanje in Malawi, where field workers discover the body of Brazilian Gabriel Buchmann. Then we go 70 days earlier, when Gabriel — taking a year off from school to purportedly study poverty in Africa — is staying with a family in Kenya.

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The friendly Gabriel (Joao Pedro Zappa, convincing) appears to have never met a stranger, and disdaining anything “touristy,” he attempts to immerse himself in the local scene by hunting for rabbits and wearing traditional African dress. It’s a naive gesture, one of youthful pretension and unwitting self-entitlement.

Gabriel and the Mountain

Drama, documentary-narrative. Starring Joao Pedro Zappa, Caroline Abras. Directed by Fellipe Barbosa. In Portuguese, Swahili, French and English, with English subtitles. (Not rated. 127 minutes.)

Eventually, Gabriel moves on to Tanzania for a rendezvous with his girlfriend, Cristina (Caroline Abras, very good), and there, they alternately bicker and show genuine affection for each other. Zappa and Abras have a lively chemistry, and when she exits before the final act, it reminds us that Gabriel’s fleeting interactions with the local residents, though convincingly realized, aren’t nearly as captivating.

In the scenes with the locals, we see snippets of Gabriel’s character, but the moments don’t drive the story along, as much as get him from point to point.

Barbosa is much more interested in examining the many sides of Gabriel — he knew the young man personally — than in solving the mystery of what happened on the Malawi mountainside.

Yet even if the proceedings sometime feel like a travelogue, the reconstructions of Gabriel’s last days alive, down to the exact locations and personal interactions, leave a strong impression.

David Lewis is a Bay Area freelance writer.

Uganda: Old Wine New Arrest

UGANDA

Old Wine, New Arrest

Ugandan pop star and member of parliament Bobi Wine was arrested for a second time on Thursday as he sought to leave the country for medical treatment just days after a judge granted him bail.

Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, was charged with treason last week, following the alleged stoning of President Yoweri Museveni’s convoy. Some 32 more opposition politicians who face related charges were also granted bail, the BBC reported.

The musician-turned-politician has claimed he was tortured during his detention after the presidential convoy was stoned at a campaign rally in the north-western town of Arua. But the army, police and the president himself have disputed those allegations.

Before his arrest, Wine had tweeted a picture of his driver, whom he claimed had been mistakenly shot and killed by police intending to kill the MP. He also campaigned against Museveni’s effort to scrap the age limit for presidential candidates and several more of Museveni’s policies.

Rwanda: The Price Of Progress

RWANDA

The Price of Progress

Campaign season is in full swing in Rwanda as the nation’s more than 7 million registered voters prepare to elect a new parliament in the first week of September.

This being the fourth parliamentary election since the end of Rwanda’s brutal civil war and the 100-day genocide in 1994 that left some 800,000 dead, many are taking the opportunity to reflect on how Rwandan democracy has evolved over the past 25 years.

The nation’s representatives, for example, are becoming younger and more female.

There will be more women than ever before on the ballot this year – 326 out of 521 candidates – making it very likely that an even greater percentage of legislators will be women this time around. Women already make up 64 percent of parliament, one of the highest proportions of female representation in the world, according to UN Women.

There are also bound to be fresh faces in parliament. The average age of candidates hovers between 38 and 42 years old. And the main opposition party in Rwanda, the Democratic Green Party, has its best chance ever to overcome the 5-percent barrier to enter parliament for the first time, wrote Rwanda Today.

“We are confident that, come elections, we shall win some seats,” said Green Party president, Frank Habineza, in an interview with the New Times, a Rwandan daily.

But for all of Rwanda’s strides over the past decade to liberalize its economy, combat corruption, open itself to international diplomacy and become a more democratic and inclusive society, progress can’t be seen everywhere.

The Rwanda Patriotic Front party of longtime President Paul Kagame, in power since 2000, is once again expected to win in a landslide – with a projected 95 percent of votes, reported the Independent, a news magazine based in Uganda.

That should come as no surprise, given the results of last year’s presidential election, in which Kagame swept the race with 99 percent of the vote, Al Jazeera reported.

The US State Department has commended Rwanda on its steps toward democracy. But such lop-sided election results leave US officials “disturbed” by both voting irregularities and the steps taken by the government to disqualify opposition candidates ahead of the election, according to a September 2017 State Department statement.

Such developments were prefaced by Kagame’s push to do away with constitutional term limits in 2015, effectively allowing him to remain in power until 2034.

Though that’s problematic, one Kagame supporter told Al Jazeera’s Up Front program that the president and his party were not corrupt, just extremely popular because of the turnaround the country has seen during his tenure.

In Rwanda, it seems one-party rule and the possibility of an autocrat ruling for life is the price of progress.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

South Sudan-No Deal

SOUTH SUDAN

No Deal

Riek Machar and other rebel leaders refused to sign a peace deal to end South Sudan’s brutal civil war, which has been raging since December 2013.

Machar and President Salva Kiir signed a ceasefire and power-sharing agreement last month that many hoped would pave the way for a lasting peace. But on Tuesday Machar refused to sign a final deal.

“The main South Sudanese opposition groups, including the SPLM-IO (Machar faction), refused to sign the final document demanding that their reservations be guaranteed in it,” Sudan‘s Foreign Minister Al-Dierdiry Ahmed said, according to Al Jazeera.

One of the main sticking points was a dispute over the number of states. Machar wants to reverse the government’s 2015 decision to divide the country into 32 states, rather than the previous 10, in what Al Jazeera suggested is an attempt to retain more power for himself.

Since it began just two years after South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan, the conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.

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Morocco-A Wiil, A Way

MOROCCO

A Will, A Way

Cross the southwestern border of Morocco – it’s a dotted line on most maps – and it’s thousands of miles of open desert: A few towns and few people and an occasional camel and windmill break the endless expanse of the Western Sahara.

Oh yeah, and then there is the military – thousands and thousands of soldiers are stationed here, and checkpoints for drivers are frequent.

There’s a reason for this overwhelming military presence, the most in Morocco.

More than 40 years ago, Morocco and a political movement representing the indigenous Sahrawi people first came to blows over Western Sahara, sparking a 16-year guerrilla war that ended in a UN-brokered stalemate.

Now diplomats are giving talks another go in hopes of resolving a conflict with the potential to upset power dynamics across the region.

The conflict stems from Spain’s withdrawal from its former colony of Spanish Sahara on Morocco’s southern border in the 1970s. Morocco laid claim to the territory, despite the international community’s calls for its decolonization and self-determination for the Sahrawi, the BBC reported.

The Polisario Front, the political force representing the Sahrawi from exile in Algeria, declared its own state in the territory. Fighting began – and lasted for more than a decade. Morocco annexed two-thirds of the territory and controversially colonized much of the area it controls.

In the current stalemate, Morocco is adamant on retaining Western Sahara as an autonomous region, and the government is unwilling to allow a referendum on the matter. For its part, the Polisario Front is vying for full-on independence.

This month, however, there’s been newfound impetus to end the conflict.

Since his appointment in 2017, the UN secretary-general’s personal envoy for Western Sahara, former German President Horst Köhler, has ping-ponged across the greater Maghreb region to restartnegotiations.

After a series of successful meetings, Köhler this month called on all parties involved to make compromises for a lasting political solution to the conflict, Morocco World News reported. The African Union also lent its support to the UN’s new efforts, signaling a united front in finally bringing an end to the conflict.

But old conflicts die hard.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI announced his country’s willingness to “confidently and responsibly” engage with the UN to find an acceptable solution, but said he wouldn’t do so without the involvement of neighboring Algeria.

The two nations are longtime rivals, with Algeria having politically and militarily supported the Polisario Front throughout the conflict. Without Algeria, the negotiations will be a “waste of time,” Omar Hilale, Morocco’s permanent UN representative, told Moroccan media.

Surprise, surprise: Algeria isn’t willing to get involved, despite nudges from partners like Russia and others.

Morocco hopes Algeria’s stubbornness on the issue will draw more sympathy from the international community to its argument for holding on to Western Sahara.

If left to its own devices, Morocco says, the territory of just over 500,000 people will either become an Iranian-Algerian proxy state bent on destabilizing the region, or a failed state serving as a hotbed for terrorist activity, the Jamestown Foundation wrote in an analysis.

Iran has denied such motives, though Morocco says it has proof of “continuous training from Hezbollah in tunnels, dug under the Moroccan defense wall,” wrote the Algeria Times.

Despite the quagmire of accusations and motives, the Polisario Front at least indicated that it’s willing to once again discuss the matter with Morocco.

But with so many conflicting political narratives, the will for peace doesn’t mean there will be a way.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Ethiopia: Ousted And Then Arrested

ETHIOPIA

Ousted, Then Arrested

Ethiopia arrested the former president of the eastern Somali region on charges of human rights abuses Monday, following his ouster earlier this month.

Abdi Mohammed Omar was arrested in connection with recent ethnic strife that forced thousands to flee the region and left at least 20 people, including five priests, dead, Al Jazeera reported.

In his statement, the attorney general accused Abdi of “stoking disputes along ethnic and religious lines”, according to the Qatar-based news network.

“Hopefully, today’s arrest of Abdi is a start to justice for victims of serious crimes in Ethiopia’s Somali region,” said Maria Burnett, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division. Earlier, a report by the watchdog group accused Abdi of running a secret jail where suspected separatists were tortured.

Abdi’s arrest is further evidence Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed means to make good on his promise to root out such abuses, which have long been endemic among the Ethiopian security forces. Abiy’s reform-minded government also fired senior regional prison officials last month over accusations of torture.

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Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Land reform Begins In South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA

White or Wrong?

South Africa began the first land seizures associated with plans to take back land from white citizens and redistribute it among black farmers, targeting two game farms in the northern province of Limpopo.

The government offered owners Akkerland Boerdery a tenth of the 200 million rands ($13.8 million) it asked for the property, prompting Akkerland Boerdery to file an injunction to prevent eviction until a court had ruled on the issue. But the Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs refused the application.

Declining to discuss specific cases, African National Congress spokesman Zizi Kodwa said the proposed land seizures are “tied to addressing the injustices of the past,” according to the Johannesburg-based City Press, the UK’s Express newspaper reported. Last week, ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe warned that the government might repossess land from white citizens who own more than 25,000 acres without compensation.

AfriForum, a civil rights group representing the white Afrikaner minority, says the government already has a target list of some 200 farms. Meanwhile, a record number of white farmers have put their property up for sale.

Monday, August 20, 2018

Johannesburg 100 Years Ago And Now

This is what Joburg looked like a century ago, compared to now

Bombi Mavundza , Business Insider SA

Aug 19, 2018, 11:01 AM

View of Park in Johannesburg's CBD. Photo: Getty

South Africa's biggest city, and one of the largest urban areas in the world, Johannesburg has a rich history.

The area was first populated by the San, followed by those from Sotho and Tswana tribes whose kingdoms stretched from Botswana, to Lesotho and the Pedi areas in the north. Many of the villages were destroyed during the Mfecane wars.

The area's identity changed with the discovery of gold in the late 1800s. Since then, Johannesburg has been shaped by mass migration and political developments.

With photos from the Getty Images archives, Business Insider South Africa tracked some of the city's changes since the 1900s.

Soweto

Many came to the City of Gold in search of riches. As a result, people of many nationalities came to live together. Government-enforced separation followed.