La Pirogue puts a human face to illegal immigration
La Pirogue, a film by Moussa Toure was first screened at Cannes festival today. The Director Mr. Toure and the part of the cast arrived at the venue accompanied by a man who has held the Senegalese flag for decades through his music, Youssou n’Dour.
Youssou n’Dour, one of the most popular Senegalese alive, is now the Culture minister after his failed attempt to run for presidency early this year. Before the film Toure told the audience, “with this film as a small African boy I feel I am making my mark of history.”
Moussa Toure, Film director and some of the cast at Cannes2012
La Pirogue (Shallow canoe used for fishing) in French mostly features Senegalese model, Comedian and actor Souleymane Seye Ndiaye who plays the character Baye Laye who leads a group of 30 illegal immigrants on a deadly journey across the Atlantic to Canary Islands.
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Cannes Film Festival; through my eyes
I am in Cannes for two weeks as part of a project by CFI together with other six bloggers from Madagascar, Togo, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Georgia to write on the film festival.
So far I have written on the films from the African continent that feature in this year’s official selection and yesterday i had a brief interview with the MD of Nigeria Film Corporation talking about Nollywood.
On Friday, Ugandans witnessed another episode of police brutality. It wasn’t just the brutality we are used to seeing. In this video ran by NTVUganda a police officer was, publicly before the cameras, groping an opposition politician Ingrid Turinawe.
Ingrid has been at the forefront of various pressure groups in Uganda for the last 5 years. She was one of the leaders of the Activists for Change (A4C), a pressure group that led the famous Walk to Work protests that took place in many parts of Uganda for the greater part of 2011 as the Arab spring was going on.
The group has been banned because in our country where we still use very colonial laws to the advantage of a dictatorial regime, the attorney general has powers to declare a group illegal even without evidence of the need to ban them. This law threatens even a blogger or writers who mention A4C as government could claim that they are promoting an illegal group with intention to ‘incite violence’. Already two journalists have been summoned by the police over an interview had with the head of the group. Human rights groups have warned on the dangers of the government-increased crackdown on freedom of speech, expression and assembly in Uganda.
Once the group A4C was banned, some of its leaders rebranded it into For God and my Country (4GC), taking after the country motto. It was after the launch of the new group that Uganda police brutality came back to our living rooms.
This time a male police offer publically groping Ingrid as another pulls her leg out of the car. The police officer didn’t grope her once, he did it repeatedly and in the video we hear Ingrid asking why the police officer was doing that. One other police officer warns his colleague but does nothing to stop this.
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What would you do?
“What would you do if instead of me from the moment you were born, every day they told you that you are less than another person, that you deserve less, that you don’t know enough to talk, that you have half the brains of another human? What would you do if you had to watch what you say, wear, do every moment of your life out of fear that someone might call you a name and the whole world might see you as “bad” so you could never be comfortable in who you are? What would you do if you were banned from going to school or harassed brutally on the way to school every day? You would not be as strong as me. You would give up. But I won’t give up. I will keep fighting no matter what the society hands me.” -Meetra Alikozay, a member of Young Women for Change, a rights based group in Kabul run by young Afghan women.
Through their work i have learnt about issues affecting women in Afghanistan. I hope to one day watch This is my City too.
Follow them on Facebook.
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Happy Easter
This is the second Easter holiday I have spent outside home. This time am next door in Nairobi with friends. Last months have been hectic and I am taking a few days to celebrate, appreciate, reflect on the gift of friendship and freedom. So my friend Rachel took these photos yesterday in cold Nairobi weather.
Easter is about freedom and someone recently asked “so Rosebell, what’s your favourite bible character?” David! To me he represents human flaws, freedom and victory. And in the end I love the fact that in the end despite all flaws God calls him “Man after my own heart”.
So to all friends, real friends, family and everyone who values freedom, may you be free!
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32
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Dr . Payam Akhavan, is a former UN Prosecutor at The Hague, he advised the Ugandan Government on the LRA case before the ICC as part of a broader strategy of isolating and defeating Kony in 2003-2005. He is now a professor of international law at McGill University n Montreal. I have known Payam for a few years. Here is what he told me about KONY2012
“The video is ten years too late. Watching it, one imagines that nobody was ever involved in this struggle before they started filming. Back in 2003, we devised a brilliant strategy with highly competent Ugandan officials on how to eliminate the LRA by depriving them of rear-bases in southern Sudan. Within two years, the war in Uganda was over and Joseph Kony’s force of several thousand was reduced to a few hundred fugitives in the Congo.
The failure to capture him thus far has nothing to do with lack of funds. It is a complex intelligence operation against a cunning and ruthless adversary who knows how to survive in the jungle. The millions in funds gathered so far are needed for rehabilitation of former child soldiers and their communities, not to pay overhead for NGOs in America. The video may be useful for public education since the world is woefully ignorant about Africa. But its content is at best uninformed and at worst deceptive. Exploiting other people’s suffering for self-promotion is unethical.
Had the Ugandan communities directly affected been consulted, the video would have had a very different focus, and the millions of dollars in funds too would have reached those that need it most.”
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Support Nodding Disease victims; the most urgent challenge to a northern Uganda child
12 year old Nancy Lamwaka one the thousands of victims of LRA war but now tormented by a new disease.
Over the last few days I have received thousands of emails in response to the video I put out in response to KONY2012. Most of the emails were from grateful people who had learnt something from my video. I am unable to read all the responses and reply you all at this time but your efforts are very much appreciated.
Most responses indicated they want to support the Ugandan child and be sure that the help goes to the right cause.
The cause
More than 3000 children in northern Uganda are currently battling a mysterious disease that has come to be known as nodding disease. Please read more from Wikipedia about Nodding Disease. There are so far 170 reported deaths.
In brief, nodding disease is a mentally and physically disabling disease that only affects children between the ages of 5 and 15. Victims get seizures on the smell of food or when they get cold. Read more from previous blog
The World Health Organisation and Centre for Disease Control (CDC) have been working on research to establish the cause and how the disease is transmitted with no success so far.
Why we need to act fast:
With the healthcare system in northern Uganda wrecked by war and in a country where the right to healthcare is not guaranteed, most children suffering from this disease have been going through unbearable suffering. Parents are forced to painfully tie their children to trees.
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More perspective on Kony2012
I know Glenna Gordon from her time in Uganda and she was one of the few American journalists who covered the later stages of the Kony war in northern Uganda. She was part of a group of journalists who travelled well with Ugandan and South Sudan officials between 2005-2009 as they went into the jungles to try and secure a peace deal with Kony. In fact she’s the one who took that photo of Invisible Children founders holding guns among SPLA soldiers. She lived in Uganda for years and worked in West Africa too. She’s the kind of journalist and voice that I wish viewers of this video would hear more often. This was her take on the video when she spoke to the Washington Post.
I can’t bring myself to watch the video. I found all of their previous efforts to be emotionally manipulative, and all the things I try as a journalist not to be. After the peace talks in 2008, they put out another video, and I saw the footage used in these videos blending archival footage with LRA and SPLA and videos of them goofing off. It was the most irresponsible act of image-making that I’d seen in a long time. They conflated the SPLA with the LRA. The SPLA is a government army, holding weapons given by the government, and yet they did not create any division between them and LRA. That’s terrible.
And for that Ms Gordon got a response from filmmaker defending Invisible Children with the worst of all narrative of three boys trying to save Africans instead of playing Angry Birds.
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Kony2012; My response to Invisible Children’s campaign.
For the last many hours i have followed a campaign by Invisible Children NGO called KONY2012 that has gone viral getting more than 20 million hits on Youtube. I am a story teller and i know the danger of a single story . It is something many people can easily ignore especially if we are outsiders to the story.
This is the video i recorded late in the night. It’s longer than i would have wanted but i just wanted to put my views out there on a conflict I have covered as a journalist and a people I have worked among as a communications officer at Isis-WICCE. I don’t in any way think I represent views of Uganda like some comments i have seen. This is me talking about the danger of portraying people with one single story and using old footage to cause hysteria when it could have been possible to get to DRC and other affected countries get a fresh perspective and also include other actors.
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Yesterday March 5, I was part of a group of women from various organisations who visited Mulago hospital acute pediatric ward to pass on a few items to children suffering from what we have come to call Nodding Disease. I learnt about the condition in 2006. It was a friend from the US who was here to work with a team investigating the condition that had told me about it. She wondered why it had not made it to the media. I really wanted to go up north and do a report or two about this mysterious disease but I never made it because at the time I worked at NTV as a reporter and it was a busy year with Kony peace talks that took precedence. Well I failed to get back to the story in subsequent years.
In brief nodding disease is a mentally and physically disabling disease that only affects young children mostly between the ages of 5 and 15. It is currently in Uganda South Sudan and Tanzania. Victims get siezures on the smell of food or getting cold and the cause is unknown and so is the cure.
About six years down the road, on Monday I was standing together with women from Uganda Women Network, FIDA, Isis-WICCE and the activist Jackie Mwesige who has been pushing the women movement to do something about this. The women had come with blanks and some items for both the child and their caretakers to hand them over. The hospital administration had been informed in time.
I arrived at about 1:15pm and I was quite surprised to see police deployed at the unit. At first I thought we were in a wrong ward, may be a ward where a wanted person was being kept. We were only here to show our support to 25 nodding disease victims who were transported to Mulago on March 02 after local leaders realized they were not getting much hearing from the central government in Kampala.
Police guarding the ward at Mulago.
All the children are from Kitgum and they part of 3000 children currently suffering from this unknown disease. The nodding disease was given prominence in Ugandan leading papers late last year and since then there has been major coverage even in international media. It took us two hours to negotiate our entry into the ward. Kitgum woman Member of Parliament Beatrice Anywar who has been at the top of calling for well-wishers to support families was present.
