Featured series 
Tag: Africa
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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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Arts & Culture
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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Campus & Community
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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Campus & Community
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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Arts & Culture
‘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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Campus & Community
‘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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Arts & Culture
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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Health
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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Campus & Community
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…
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Arts & Culture
In search of grammatical architecture behind words
When not in a classroom or laboratory, Maria Polinsky spends time doing fieldwork off the southeast coast of Africa, in Madagascar. She studies Malagasy, a melting-pot language whose influences start in Borneo and now borrow from Swahili, Arabic, and French.
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Science & Tech
Ingenious use of indigenous tree reaps award
The jatropha tree is a humble — some might even say homely — plant, with large, maple-like leaves and clusters of inedible fruit that, when mature, look too brown and shriveled to be of much use to anyone. But to thousands of rural eastern and southern Africans, the jatropha is a beautiful thing. It represents…
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Nation & World
Africans is U.S. practice range of religions
In Nigeria, where Jacob Olupona was born, there are more Anglicans than there are in England. There is also a growing Pentecostal movement as well as a large Roman Catholic presence. In 2005 when the College of Cardinals met in Rome to choose a new pope, one of the leading contenders was a Nigerian, Cardinal…
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Arts & Culture
Modern Girl Project views women between the wars
When American women won the right to vote in 1919, the logical question was, What next? Suffragists had the answer ready: full enjoyment of civil and domestic life for women, equal to that of men. But suffragists found out that what was next was not much. It would be decades before American women gained anything…
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Health
Jane Goodall: A life in the field
As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood. Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that…
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Nation & World
Former child soldier gives stirring talk
Call him Ishmael. But don’t call him part of a “lost generation.” It’s a phrase that “I absolutely detest,” Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone, told his audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government March 14 at an event co-sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
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Arts & Culture
Tackling tradition and taboos
Mary Gitagno plainly remembers the pain of her traditional Tanzanian tribe’s female circumcision ritual. It is a pain she determined her own daughters would never feel. In the years since, Gitagno went far beyond sparing her daughters from female genital mutilation, beginning a nonprofit organization to lobby the government and educate the public about the…
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Health
Poor fall behind in birth control
Modern contraception has come a long way in the past 20 years, what with diaphragms, hormones, implants, intrauterine devices, condoms, spermicides, and sterilization. But the boom in birth control has been a bust for the poorest women in the world.
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Campus & Community
Renewable electricity effort receives Roy Award
The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) has announced that the 2007 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership will go to the Hybrid Systems for Rural Electrification in Africa (HSREA). The HSREA project provides reliable, renewable electricity to rural African villages through a system of solar panel technology combined with modified diesel motors running on pure…