It's being called a game changer - and the start of a new era. Germany has promised to begin returning the artefacts known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria next year, making it the first country to do so.
Germany has a collection of just over 1,000 Benin Bronzes. They're on display in museums in Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Stuttgart. The sculptures and metal plaques are from the ancient Kingdom of Benin - which is today known as Edo State in southern Nigeria. The Bronzes were looted by British soldiers in 1897 and sold to museums in North America and Europe. The largest collection of the Bronzes is held by the British Museum.
Nigeria has been trying to get the bronzes back for decades. Without success. But momentum has been building over the last few years... with calls growing ever louder for artefacts seized during the colonial era to be returned to their places of origin. Germany's culture minister explained why Berlin had decided to act now. She said:
''We are confronting our historic and moral responsibility. We want to contribute to a common understanding and reconciliation with the descendants of the people who were robbed of their cultural treasures during the times of colonialism.''
It's not just the Benin Bronzes from Nigeria that are wanted by their rightful owners. There is also a claim from Cameroon from where a special artefact known as the Tangay was stolen from a local King. More than a century later it is still in Germany. But not everyone in Cameroon is of the view that it should be brought back to the country.
In Douala, Cameroon Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III has been advocating for the return of the Tangue, a sculpture stolen from his grandfather in 1884. Prince Ndumbe has made a copy of the Tangue and put it on show in Cameroon.
The original artifact - looted by the Germans during colonial times - is on display at a museum in Munich.

But not everyone agrees that the Tangue should be immediately returned. Princess Marilyn Douala Bell is an artist and founder of an art center in Douala. Even though her great-grandfather was executed in 1914 for resisting German rule, Marilyn thinks Cameroon is not ready to receive the artefact.

Others in Douala also claim to be the rightful owners of the Tangue. At least one more descendant of a Douala King has made a claim on the artifact. For Marilyn this is a source of concern. She wants the tangue to be returned but fears the conditions are currently not right.


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#BeninBronzes #Nigeria #LootedArtefacts

The role of the thorny acacia tree in the survival of wildlife in Tanzania's arid Serengeti Plain. The flat-topped trees help sustain bush elephants, giraffes, impalas, weaver and secretary birds, and a variety of insects.

7 Impressive Benefits of Baobab

A few of the most important health benefits of baobab include its ability to boost the immune system, build bone strength, soothe the gastrointestinal system, prevent chronic disease, lower inflammation, reduce blood pressure, and stimulate growth and repair.

Baobab Trees

Some of the oldest and most majestic trees in the world fall into a very special genus named Adansonia, more commonly known as baobab trees. While there are nine different species of these trees scattered across Madagascar, Africa, Australia, and other parts of South Asia, they are all closely related and share very similar characteristics. They are massive angiosperm trees, with radii exceeding 150 feet and at times, standing more than 50 feet in height. The baobab fruit, however, often gets less attention than it should, as this fruit has been considered a superfruit by some cultures for generations. The popularity of baobab fruit and its constituent powder has grown in recent years, due to the high concentrations of nutrients and minerals that it contains.

The baobab powder may be consumed as a supplement, but is also used as a thickener in certain culinary preparations, while the leaves, which are also quite nutrient-rich, are considered a leafy vegetable and are sometimes harvested for their essential oils. Baobab fruit is roughly 3 lbs and resembled a coconut, with a tart taste. This has made it popular as a natural food product for thousands of years. That being said, let’s take a closer look at some of the many known medical uses and health benefits of baobab.
Health Benefits of Baobab
Improves Circulatory Health

One of the reasons baobab has been dubbed a superfruit is due to its concentration of certain minerals, including iron. This mineral is a key component in hemoglobin, which transports oxygenated blood throughout our body. This can prevent anemia and provide us with a major energy boost, so baobab fruit in any form can be enjoyed for a quick pick me up!
Lowers Blood Pressure

Potassium is another important mineral constituent of baobab fruit, which is known to be beneficial for heart health. As a vasodilator, potassium is able to ease the strain on the cardiovascular system by dilating the blood vessels and arteries, thus increasing blood flow and keeping the heart from working too hard. Lowering blood pressure can also help fight against atherosclerosis, strokes, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular complications.

Increases Bone Strength

The dried powder of baobab fruit is particularly concentrated with minerals, and two of these, calcium and magnesium, are important minerals for bone strength. If you are worried about bone mineral density loss as you age, or are already suffering from some of the effects of age-related degradation, adding a baobab supplement to your health regimen is never a bad idea to keep your bones strong and durable into your old age!
Relieves Gastrointestinal Issues

Two types of fiber, soluble and insoluble, are present in baobab, which is why this fruit has been trusted as a gastrointestinal aid for generations. These types of dietary fiber can do wonders for the system; in addition to optimizing the digestive process and reducing inflammation in the gut, dietary fiber also helps to regulate glucose and insulin levels in the blood, and even lowers negative cholesterol, thus boosting heart health! There are also certain prebiotic properties of baobab fruit that can improve the bacteria levels in your gut and optimize digestion.
Treats Chronic Diseases

Antioxidants have been a recent buzzword in natural health, and baobab fruit is packed with these free radical-neutralizing compounds. Antioxidant levels can be measured based on the amount of oxygen radicals a fruit or food is able to absorb, and baobab does very well in an ORAC test (measuring antioxidant strength). This means that baobab is able to help prevent a wide range of chronic diseases, including some forms of cancer that develop when free radicals cause healthy cells to mutate.
Boosts Immunity

Vitamin C is always one of the first compounds noted in a newly discovered fruit, and the immune system-boosting potential of this ancient fruit is definitely a result of the high ascorbic content. Baobab is good for increasing white blood cell count and stimulating the immune system to fight off foreign pathogens, in addition to vitamin C’s antioxidant behavior.

Promotes Growth and Repair

Vitamin C is also a key component of collagen, which we need for the repair and growth of tissues, cells, blood vessels, cartilage, and bone. High levels of ascorbic acid don’t just protect our immune system, but also ensure normal development and appropriate healing times after injuries, illnesses, and surgeries.

Thorough breakdown of private central banking and how printing money is the nexus of control for the international bankers. Although this is information is based on centuries of repetitious behavior of the financial elite, it is completely off-limits in the controlled media because it exposes the root source of the world's monetary enslavement: fractional reserve lending and a private corporation (the federal reserve) printing the money supply.

Join us Live today #PanAfricanDTV #KingBhungane111

Niger has long been a key staging point for migrants and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan West Africa, but the traffic reached a peak in 2015/16 when the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimated that 330,000 people followed the desert routes north - through often inhospitable country - to reach Libya or Algeria, and then the Mediterranean coast and sea crossings to Europe.

The exponential growth mostly came about because the chaotic descent of Libya into civil conflict in the years after the Arab Spring opened up new routes and border crossings and made it easier for people traffickers to operate in the security vacuum, but it also flourished because it generated significant income and employment for northern Niger and its largest city, Agadez. Much of this was from the perfectly legitimate businesses - in transport and accommodation - that sprang up to service and feed off and then further develop the migrant trade. The increased wealth was welcomed because it helped bring back a measure of stability to an area that had seen its own insurgency during the Tuareg Rebellion of 2007-2009 and which had been struggling economically in the aftermath.

But even as the traffic was burgeoning, the Nigerien government was coming under pressure from the European Union, which was keen to find a response to the alarming flows of people coming across the Mediterranean. Close to its own maritime borders the EU began working with the Libyan coastguard and others to refashion methods of deterring that sea borne traffic, but it also looked for innovative ways of stemming the movement of people on land much further south.

So, to the grateful relief of the EU, Niger passed new anti-smuggling laws. In early 2016, its interior minister Mohamed Bazoum ordered their implementation across the country, sending police out to arrest smugglers (most of whom, of course, had previously been operating within locals laws) and confiscating hordes of the ubiquitous pick-up trucks that drivers had become used to piling high with lucrative migrant passengers.

The new laws quickly began making a big dent in the migrant flow, bringing down the number of travelers passing through Agadez from around 24,000 a month in 2016 to around 5500 a month in 2017.

But there have been other consequences and many of them difficult for Niger. The economic fallout for the north of the country has been considerable - with revenues in Agadez alone being reduced by around $117 million a year, according to the IOM. Indeed the losses across the area have been so significant that the EU has had to offer $635 million to compensate those who had once made a living out of migration through a reconversion plan involving business grants and loans and other support, although so far the difficulties of qualifying for any such support seem to be keeping the take-up of these opportunities to a minimum.

Moreover, where previously migrants were able to move openly, they now have to use clandestine back routes through remote desert country to avoid villages and police patrols. This is dangerous. The UN roughly estimates that for every migrant death in the Mediterranean sea, now two die in the Sahara desert.

Meanwhile, community leaders fear that youth unemployment and the lack of long-term investment (notwithstanding the EU's struggling compensation scheme) to develop alternative economic models could lead to increasing criminality and insecurity. With the migrant traffic suppressed, police warn that drug trafficking is becoming an ever more attractive option and elders fear that idle young men who would once have worked in the migration trade could now easily fall prey to the competing radical attractions of Boko Haram or Daesh, which pose a growing threat across this part of West Africa.

So how to best assess the EU's apparent attempt to push Europe's borders this far south? Niger is rated as one of the world's least-developed nations by the UN, but is it now paying too high a price for Europe's anti-immigration policies? We sent correspondent Juliana Ruhfus and filmmakers Marco Salustro and Victoria Baux to find out.

Just a few decades ago, Ethiopia was a country defined by its famines, particularly between 1983-1985 when in excess of half a million people starved to death as a consequence of drought, crop failure and a brutal civil war.

Against this backdrop, in recent years, Ethiopia has been experiencing stellar economic growth. The headline statistics are certainly remarkable: the country is creating millionaires faster than any other in Africa; output from farming, Ethiopia’s dominant industry, has tripled in a decade; the capital Addis Ababa is experiencing a massive construction boom; and the last six years have seen the nation’s GDP grow by a staggering 108 percent.

But it is not all positive news.

Around 90 percent of the population of 87 million still suffers from numerous deprivations, ranging from insufficient access to education to inadequate health care; average incomes are still well below $1500 a year; and more than 30 million people still face chronic food shortages.

Many critics say that the growth seen in agriculture, which accounts for almost half of Ethiopia’s economic activity and a great deal of its recent success, is actually being driven by an out of control ‘land grab', as multinational companies and private speculators vie to lease millions of acres of the country’s most fertile territory from the government at bargain basement prices.

At the ministry of agriculture in Addis Ababa, this land-lease programme is often described as a "win-win" because it brings in new technologies and employment and, supposedly, makes it easier to improve health care, education and other services in rural areas.

"Ethiopia needs to develop to fight poverty, increase food supplies and improve livelihoods and is doing so in a sustainable way," said one official.

But according to a host of NGO’s and policy advocates, including Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and the Oakland Institute, the true consequences of the land grabs are almost all negative. They say that in order to make such huge areas available for foreign investors to grow foodstuffs and bio-fuels for export - and in direct contravention of Ethiopia’s obligations under international law - the authorities are displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples, abusing their human rights, destroying their traditions, trashing the environment, and making them more dependent on food aid than ever before.

The most controversial element of the government’s programme is known as 'villagisation' - the displacement of people from land they have occupied for generations and their subsequent resettlement in artificial communities.

In Gambella, where two ethnic groups, the Anuaks and the Nuers, predominate, it has meant tens of thousands of people have been forced to abandon a traditional way of life. One such is Moot, an Anuak farmer who now lives in a government village far from his home.

Despite growing internal opposition and international criticism, the Ethiopian government shows no sign of scaling the programme back. According to the Oakland Institute, since 2008, an area the size of France has already been handed over to foreign corporations. Over the next few years an area twice that size is thought to be earmarked for leasing to investors.

So what does all this mean for the people on the ground? In Ethiopia – Land for Sale, filmmakers Veronique Mauduy and Romain Pelleray try and find out.

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Can Somalia's embattled president unite his country against the armed group al-Shabab?

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On 4 February 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached “The Drum Major Instinct” from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Ironically, two months before his assassination on 4 April 1968, he told his congregation what he would like said at his funeral: “I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody” (King, “The Drum Major,” 185). Excerpts were played at King’s nationally televised funeral service, held at Ebenezer on 9 April 1968.King’s sermon was an adaptation of the 1952 homily “Drum-Major Instincts” by J. Wallace Hamilton, a well-known, liberal, white Methodist preacher. Both men tell the biblical story of James and John, who ask Jesus for the most prominent seats in heaven. At the core of their desire was a “drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade” (King, “The Drum Major,” 170–171). King warns his congregation that this desire for importance can lead to “snobbish exclusivism” and “tragic race prejudice”: “Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior … and to feel that their white skin ordained them to be first” (King, “The Drum Major,” 176; 178). Conversely, King preached that when Jesus responded to the request by James and John, he did not rebuke them for their ambition, but taught that greatness comes from humble servitude. As King put it, Jesus “reordered priorities,” and told his disciples to “Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love” (King, “The Drum Major,” 181; 182).https://kinginstitute.stanford.....edu/encyclopedia/dr for historical purposes.

Great panel discussion in the aftermath of the Watts uprising exploring the future of America, the successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement and the need for financial empowerment in addition to integration. As Floyd McKissick discusses ay 37:15 , the Civil Right's movement only benefited the Talented Tenth. The uprising s were a reflection of Revolution. Selection from the 6th annual Philadelphia Public Service Conference sponsored by Group W, whose theme was "The Unfinished American Revolution : Crisis in Black and White." Liner Notes:Racial conflict is one of the most urgent problems of urban America. Unlike the other dilemmas of the city -water and air pollution, inadequate transportation, growing slums, overtaxed educational facilities, increas­ing crime, and others--the racial problem seems to be the least sensitive to immediate or lasting cures.This was the prevailing view point of a distinguished panel of experts w ho addressed the 350 delegates in attendance at the Philadelphia Con­ference, the sixth such meeting held under Group W sponsorship to ex­plore new concepts in radio and television public service programming.Using the theme, ''The Unfinished American Revolution” Crisis in Black and White,"" the panelists who discussed the racial problems included J. Alfred Cannon, M.D., Associate Director, Division of social and Community Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles ;"Major General George M. Gelsto n, the Adjutant General of Maryland and former Acting Police Commissioner, Batimore ; Floyd B. McKissick, National Director, the Congress of Racial Equality; Dr. Alex Rosen, Dean of the Graduate School of Social Work , New York University; Reverend Leon H. Sullivan, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Opportunities Industrialization Center, Philadelphia. The panel· moderator was Herbert Cahan, Group W area vice presi­dent, Baltimore.Highlights from the discussion are presented in these recordings-an examination of ''The Crisis in Black and White.