Featured series 
Tag: Africa
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Nation & World
Early success highlights need for more progress
Many of the 500,000 African babies born infected with HIV each year won’t live past age 2, a fact made even more appalling by the fact that doctors know how to halt mother-to-child HIV transmission.
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Nation & World
Nigerian lawyer is a champion of women
In 2002, a young Nigerian woman by the name of Amina Lawal — pregnant and unmarried — was tried for adultery under Shariah, Islam’s traditional law. She was sentenced to be stoned to death, a fate that briefly riveted the attention of media worldwide.
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Nation & World
Images of terror through the eyes of children
Basma was 8 when Janjaweed fighters on horseback swept into her village in the Darfur region of Sudan. Above them, helicopter gunships joined in the attack.
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Nation & World
Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry
Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.
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Nation & World
Rights champion Goldstone speaks
In human rights terms, Richard J. Goldstone, the 70-year-old veteran of South Africa’s highest courts and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has walked the walk and talked the talk — chiefly by having a role in a number of this generation’s most important humanitarian events.
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Nation & World
Post-colonial wars parsed at Radcliffe
Last week, a two-day interdisciplinary conference on post-colonial wars got under way at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Oct. 30-31 event was the capstone of two years of private meetings at Radcliffe by high-level experts on the wars that followed independence movements in Africa and Asia after World War II.
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Nation & World
HSPH expands HIV/AIDS work in Tanzania
Nearly 150 years ago, the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam was known by another name — Mzizima, meaning “healthy town” in the local language. But over the decades, the city and the country of Tanzania have experienced mounting challenges to that health.
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Nation & World
Du Bois Institute announces new fellows
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced the appointment of 18 new institute fellows for the 2008-09 academic year.
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Nation & World
Attacking the ties that bind poverty, illness
Jim Yong Kim remembers the drive home from the airport with his father, a dentist in the small Iowa city where Kim was raised. His dad asked Kim, who was on a break from Brown University, what he’d decided to study.
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Nation & World
A pandemic’s front lines
Jim Yong Kim walked out of the small cinder block room where an underweight boy of 5 lay, his heart rate down to 115 from the dangerous 150 beats per minute at which it had been racing moments earlier. Kim stripped rubber gloves from his hands. “That was incredibly gutsy,” he said flatly…
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Nation & World
Nasredeen Abdulbari: ‘Lawyers are the cement of society.’
Nasredeen Abdulbari identifies no particular “aha!” moment when he knew what his life’s work would be.
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Nation & World
South Africa: Edendale Hospital
On a hill in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province, near the hall where Nelson Mandela delivered his last speech before prison and the station where Mahatma Gandhi was tossed off a train to begin his life’s work, stands Edendale Hospital.
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Nation & World
Surgeon describes horrors that ensue when rape is a ‘weapon of war’
Denis Mukwege, a recent visitor to Harvard, is slow-spoken, weary, and grave. And well he might be. For nearly a decade, Mukwege has been doctor to thousands of women raped in the course of a long civil war in south central Africa — in effect, that continent’s World War II — which has so far…
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Nation & World
Zoellick wants to ‘retool’ the World Bank
World Bank President Robert Zoellick reiterated his call to retool the organization to better meet the new set of development challenges across the globe during a discussion Thursday night (April 3) at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Nation & World
Conference brings out pacific potential of African hip-hop
Harvard and hip-hop. One is the famous university, the other the music style marked by rapping, rhyming, and a synthetic backbeat. Both begin with the letter “h.” Nothing else in common, right? Wrong. Harvard last week (March 13-15) hosted a three-day conference on African hip-hop, a musical style that experts say not only makes audiences…
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Nation & World
Tutu sees lots of negatives, a few positives, in American foreign policy
Desmond Tutu was a high school teacher in Johannesburg before he entered the ministry, and all these years later he is still very much the pedagogue. “Good afternoon,” he said…
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Nation & World
Atrocities attract healing hands to the Congo
The rape itself was brutal enough, but the woman’s nearly severed hand shocked Susan Bartels.
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Nation & World
Africans, ‘Africanness,’ and the Soviets
It’s no secret that a century and a half after the Civil War, the United States still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of African slavery.
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Nation & World
Looking at China’s role in Africa
China’s increasing influence in Africa is a double-edged sword that wields the potential for prosperity and despair.
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
The Lindbergh Foundation recently named Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Peter Girguis one its 14 Lindbergh Grant recipients for 2007. ProCor, a global communication program promoting heart health founded by Harvard School of Public Health Professor of Cardiology Emeritus Bernard Lown, has granted its first Louise Lown Heart Hero Award to the Heart…
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Nation & World
Cultural Survival to bring world’s wares, tastes to Cambridge
Nonprofit organization Cultural Survival will celebrate 28 years of bringing native art and crafts to the University community with an upcoming holiday bazaar Nov. 24 and 25 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Cambridge College, 1000 Massachusetts Ave. The bazaar, which is being co-sponsored by Harvard, will feature unique products by indigenous artisans from…
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Nation & World
‘Ethiojazz’ sets feet to tapping
A masinko is about as simple as a stringed instrument can get — a wooden box with a neck protruding from one corner and a single string stretched across its face. The one Setegn Atanaw plays is the amplified version, airbrushed in red and yellow like a Fender Stratocaster.
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Nation & World
Wade hails ‘African renaissance’
His Excellency Abdoulaye Wade, president of the Republic of Senegal, visited Harvard last week (Sept. 27). Looking younger than his 81 years, he walked onto the stage at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum to the sound of a tama, a West African “talking drum” used to telegraph complex messages.
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Nation & World
‘Witness to Darfur’ to bring awareness to Sanders Theatre
The Boston Landmarks Orchestra and Harvard Extension School will co-present “Witness to Darfur,” a unique evening of dialogue, film, and music, in Sanders Theatre on Oct. 1 at 8 p.m. The two-hour program aims to draw attention to the tragic events in Sudan, while acknowledging the work of organizations and individuals who are committed to…
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Nation & World
New index quantifies performance of governments
“All citizens of all countries desire to be governed well.” That plain statement — universal and self-evident — is the first sentence of a Harvard-generated report released this week in London. According to its authors, it is the first attempt in the world to systematically and objectively quantify governance.
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Nation & World
Study abroad program sings
This summer, five Harvard College students exchanged dorm life for West African village life to investigate the role of music and dance in Malian culture. As participants in Harvard’s summer study-abroad program “Music and Dance in Mali — Ethnography in Practice,” the students had the opportunity to live among and learn from some of the…
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Nation & World
Humanitarian aid professionals strategize
The public and private agencies that respond to war and disasters sometimes respond disastrously — and it’s time to do something about it. That was the basic message of a three-day Humanitarian Health Conference at Harvard Sept. 6-8, which drew more than 120 emergency physicians, epidemiologists, and professional aid workers from 68 organizations.
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Nation & World
Bobo, Morgan return to Harvard
Marcyliena Morgan, a noted linguistic anthropologist, and Lawrence D. Bobo, a renowned sociologist, have been appointed professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Both will join the Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS); Bobo will have a joint appointment in sociology. Morgan and Bobo, who are husband and wife, were members of…