International
Burkina Faso immortalizes Rawlings as son Kimathi rallies Africa for unity

In a symbolic ceremony that underscored the bond between Ghana and Burkina Faso, a street in Ouagadougou was named after Ghana’s former President, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings. Speaking after the event, his son, Kimathi Rawlings, reflected on his father’s legacy, the legacy of Thomas Sankara, and the urgent need for African unity.
“I think it’s something that should have happened at this magnitude a while ago,” Kimathi said in an interview with GTV. “The Thomas Sankara Foundation has done its best to keep [Sankara’s] legend alive. And we’ve always been happy to support.”
Jerry John Rawlings and Thomas Sankara, both revolutionary leaders of their time, were not only close political allies but personal friends. Their vision for pan-Africanism and grassroots empowerment continues to resonate across the continent, especially following the rise of Ibrahim Traoré, the Burkinabé military officer and politician who has served as interim President of the country since 2022.
Kimathi said: “President Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, my father, was a huge supporter of the foundation and he was a very close friend of Thomas Sankara.”
The occasion drew representatives and well-wishers from across the continent, a show of solidarity that Kimathi described as profoundly meaningful.
“It means a lot to be here and it means a lot that the whole of Africa was more or less here to support this momentous occasion,” he said. “United we will rise and divided we will fall. That’s the way I look at it.”

He used the platform to make a broader call for unity across Africa, stressing that the current climate presents a rare and critical opportunity for the continent to come together.
“I think now more than ever, we have the opportunity to come together as a continent. Many have come before who have tried to accomplish this. But I think the atmosphere is perfect for that kind of unity,” Kimathi stated. “We see what is happening in the West and for once I think we are in a position to look inward at ourselves and see how we can progress as a continent.”
He emphasized the need for collaboration, saying Africa must resist working in silos. “Not just divided where everybody is doing something in their own little corner. Together, I think we can be a force for good in this world.”
Kimathi said he believes the continent’s leaders are on the cusp of achieving this long-sought unity.
“Let’s streamline things, let’s work towards a better future. And I think our leaders are on the precipice of making that happen. So I think we’re in a good place.”

“But certainly,” he concluded, “united we will be able to accomplish that.”
Sankara Circle: Ghana did it too
The naming of a street in Burkina Faso after Thomas Sankara follows a similar gesture by Jerry John Rawlings.
Sankara Circle, once a prominent landmark in Accra, has undergone several transformations. Originally known as Akuafo Roundabout, it was later renamed Redemption Circle during the National Redemption Council era. Under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) led by Jerry John Rawlings, it became Sankara Circle, honoring Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara.
In 1997, construction began on Ghana’s first interchange at this site, culminating in the Sankara Interchange’s completion in 1999. However, in 2005, the interchange was renamed Ako Adjei Interchange by the Kufuor administration to honor Dr. Ebenezer Ako Adjei, a founding member of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and one of Ghana’s “Big Six” leaders.
Despite the official renaming, many locals continue to refer to the area as Sankara Circle.
International
Trump’s travel ban on Togo, other 11 countries goes into effect today

U.S. President Donald Trump’s order banning citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States goes into effect at 12:01 am ET (0401 GMT) on Monday, a move the president promulgated to protect the country from “foreign terrorists.”
The countries affected by the latest travel ban are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The entry of people from seven other countries – Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela – will be partially restricted.
Trump, a Republican, said the countries subject to the most severe restrictions were determined to harbor a “large-scale presence of terrorists,” fail to cooperate on visa security, have an inability to verify travelers’ identities, as well as inadequate record-keeping of criminal histories and high rates of visa overstays in the United States.
He cited last Sunday’s incident in Boulder, Colorado, in which an Egyptian national tossed a gasoline bomb into a crowd of pro-Israel demonstrators as an example of why the new curbs are needed. But Egypt is not part of the travel ban.
The travel ban forms part of Trump’s policy to restrict immigration into the United States and is reminiscent of a similar move in his first term when he barred travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Officials and residents in countries whose citizens will soon be banned expressed dismay and disbelief.
Chad President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said he had instructed his government to stop granting visas to U.S. citizens in response to Trump’s action.
“Chad has neither planes to offer nor billions of dollars to give, but Chad has its dignity and its pride,” he said in a Facebook post, referring to countries such as Qatar, which gifted the U.S. a luxury airplane for Trump’s use and promised to invest billions of dollars in the U.S.
Afghans who worked for the U.S. or U.S.-funded projects and were hoping to resettle in the U.S. expressed fear that the travel ban would force them to return to their country, where they could face reprisal from the Taliban.
Democratic U.S. lawmakers also voiced concern about the policies.
“Trump’s travel ban on citizens from over 12 countries is draconian and unconstitutional,” said U.S. Representative Ro Khanna on social media late on Thursday. “People have a right to seek asylum.”
Source: reuters
International
Liberia’s ex-speaker charged with arson over parliament fire

Liberia’s former speaker of parliament has been charged with arson over a fire which destroyed the nation’s House of Representatives, local police have said.
The huge blaze broke out last December, a day after plans to remove Jonathan Fonati Koffa from his role as speaker sparked protests in the capital, Monrovia.
Koffa had been locked in a stand-off with his political opponents, with dozens of lawmakers voting for his impeachment in October over accusations of poor governance, corruption and conflicts of interest.
He has previously denied any connection to the fire breaking out.
Police said on Friday that there were “credible links” to suggest Koffa was “strategically involved” in the incident. Five other lawmakers have also been detained in connection with the case.
Police chief Gregory Colman said Koffa had been charged with a string of offences including arson, criminal mischief, endangering other people, and attempted murder.
Colman said Koffa had used his office and staff “to co-ordinate sabotage efforts from as early as November 2023”, according to news agency AFP.
Koffa and several other lawmakers were summoned to the Liberian National Police headquarters on Friday as “persons of interest” in the case, local media reports.
The former speaker and three sitting members of the House of Representatives were then remanded to Monrovia Central Prison on Saturday, newspaper FrontPage Africa reported.
The blaze on 18 December 2024 destroyed the entire joint chambers of the West African nation’s legislature. No one was inside the building at the time.
The day before had seen tense protests over the plans to remove Koffa, with demonstrators including an aide to former President George Weah arrested.
Several individuals, including Koffa and Representative Frank Saah Foko, were brought in for questioning by police.
Foko, a prominent figure in the House of Representatives, allegedly uploaded a video to Facebook in which he said: “If they want us to burn the chambers, we will burn it.”
A team of independent US investigators brought in to assist the investigation concluded that the fire was set deliberately.
Liberia’s House of Representatives has been beset by a long-running power struggle.
Although the bid to impeach Koffa fell short of the two-thirds majority required, the group of 47 lawmakers who had voted for the move unilaterally appointed their own speaker.
Last month, Koffa resigned as speaker after months of political deadlock.
International
An ancient writing system confounding myths about Africa

A wooden hunters’ toolbox inscribed with an ancient writing system from Zambia has been making waves on social media.
“We’ve grown up being told that Africans didn’t know how to read and write,” says Samba Yonga, one of the founders of the virtual Women’s History Museum of Zambia.
“But we had our own way of writing and transmitting knowledge that has been completely side-lined and overlooked,” she tells the BBC.
It was one of the artefacts that launched an online campaign to highlight women’s roles in pre-colonial communities – and revive cultural heritages almost erased by colonialism.
Another intriguing object is an intricately decorated leather cloak not seen in Zambia for more than 100 years.
“The artefacts signify a history that matters – and a history that is largely unknown,” says Yonga.
“Our relationship with our cultural heritage has been disrupted and obscured by the colonial experience.
“It’s also shocking just how much the role of women has been deliberately removed.”

But, says Yonga, “there’s a resurgence, a need and a hunger to connect with our cultural heritage – and reclaim who we are, whether through fashion, music or academic studies”.
“We had our own language of love, of beauty,” she says. “We had ways that we took care of our health and our environment. We had prosperity, union, respect, intellect.”
A total of 50 objects have been posted on social media – alongside information about their significance and purpose that shows that women were often at the heart of a society’s belief systems and understanding of the natural world.
The images of the objects are presented inside a frame – playing on the idea that a surround can influence how you look at and perceive a picture. In the same way that British colonialism distorted Zambian histories – through the systematic silencing and destruction of local wisdom and practices.
The Frame project is using social media to push back against the still-common idea that African societies did not have their own knowledge systems.
The objects were mostly collected during the colonial era and kept in storage in museums all over the world, including Sweden – where the journey for this current social media project began in 2019.
Yonga was visiting the capital, Stockholm, and a friend suggested that she meet Michael Barrett, one of the curators of the National Museums of World Cultures in Sweden.
She did – and when he asked her what country she was from, Yonga was surprised to hear him say that the museum had a lot of Zambian artefacts.
“It really blew my mind, so I asked: ‘How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'”
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.
There are close to 650 Zambian cultural objects in the museum, collected over the course of a century – as well as about 300 historical photographs.

When Yonga and her virtual museum co-founder Mulenga Kapwepwe explored the archives, they were astonished to find the Swedish collectors had travelled far and wide – some of the artefacts come from areas of Zambia that are still remote and hard to reach.
The collection includes reed fishing baskets, ceremonial masks, pots, a waist belt of cowry shells – and 20 leather cloaks in pristine condition collected during a 1911-1912 expedition.
They are made from the skin of a lechwe antelope by the Batwa men and worn by the women or used by the women to protect their babies from the elements.
On the fur outside are “geometric patterns, meticulously, delicately and beautifully designed”, Yonga says.
There are pictures of the women wearing the cloaks, and a 300-page notebook written by the person who brought the cloaks to Sweden – ethnographer Eric Van Rosen.
He also drew illustrations showing how the cloaks were designed and took photographs of women wearing the cloaks in different ways.
“He took great pains to show the cloak being designed, all the angles and the tools that were used, and [the] geography and location of the region where it came from.”
The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks – and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.
So Yonga and Kapwepwe went to find out more from the community in the Bengweulu region in north-east of the country where the cloaks came from.
“There’s no memory of it,” says Yonga. “Everybody who held that knowledge of creating that particular textile – that leather cloak – or understood that history was no longer there.
“So it only existed in this frozen time, in this Swedish museum.”

One of Yonga’s personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.
It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga’s own north-western region of Zambia.
Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people’s bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade – and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.
The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment – as well as instructions on community life.
The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women – and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.
They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga’s ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.
“Sona’s been one of the most popular social media posts – with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: ‘Like, what, what? How is this possible?'”
The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women’s Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.
She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women’s History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.
It belonged only to the woman who used it – it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community’s food security.
“What might look like just a grinding stone is in fact a symbol of women’s power,” Yonga says.
The Women’s History Museum of Zambia was set up in 2016 to document and archive women’s histories and indigenous knowledge.
It is conducting research in communities and creating an online archive of items that have been taken out of Zambia.
“We’re trying to put together a jigsaw without even having all the pieces yet – we’re on a treasure hunt.”
A treasure hunt that has changed Yonga’s life – in a way that she hopes the Frame social media project will also do for other people.
“Having a sense of my community and understanding the context of who I am historically, politically, socially, emotionally – that has changed the way I interact in the world.”
Penny Dale is a freelance journalist, podcast and documentary-maker based in London.
bbc.com
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