 Hotel Kaesong/Creative Commons license🇪🇹 Ethiopia’s Fendika Cultural Center, located in the central Kazanchis district of the capital Addis Ababa, is set to be demolished after local government agents gave notice last month. The center is the latest to be targeted for demolition in a trend that seeks to reduce informal housing in the city, its cultural significance notwithstanding. Fendika, known by many as the center for Ethio-Jazz traditions, indigenous dances, and cultural performances, welcomes about 200,000 tourists a year, writes Rachel Dubale for Africa is a Country. The notice for demolition “serves as a reminder that the local population of Addis Ababa has been enduring a difficult phenomenon for some time now: the demolition and eviction of people’s habitats to give life to new entertainment venues,” she writes. 🌍 Mineral-rich countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are pushing to restrict the export of key raw minerals such as nickel, cobalt, and lithium, the Wall Street Journal reports. The countries are demanding that miners build processing plants locally and looking to tighten control over foreign-operated mines. With electric vehicles needing up to six times the mineral inputs of fossil fuel-powered cars, mineral demand for use in EVs and battery storage could grow 30 times by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. Semafor Africa reported from Zimbabwe in March on how the country’s ban on raw lithium exports to boost local processing had instead helped preferred Chinese and Western companies gain a foothold. 🇺🇬 What happens when Africans go on a road trip as tourists through Africa? We get to learn this through the eyes and ears of a young Ugandan couple when they took a tour of East and southern Africa. Maureen Agena and Edward Echwalu tell The Guardian how they saved around $25,000 over several years to go on a 14,000-mile journey through Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Malawi, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola. They were surprised to find that most people they met knew little about Uganda but also that no one expected them to be tourists. “Tourism has been painted white on the continent,” said Echwalu. “People found it difficult to believe that we’d take time and tour without ‘a purpose.’” 🇳🇬 An investigative report tried to establish whether there’s a connection between the Nigerian pro-Biafran separatist group and a violent militia by studying hundreds of social media posts by the group’s affiliated accounts. HumAngle’s Kunle Adebajo pored over posts on Facebook and other social media platforms, as well as traditional media, to understand if IPOB affiliates had been strategically amplifying the violent activities of UGM (Unknown Gunmen). The latter have caused much harm in the country’s troubled southeastern region in recent years through a spate of killings, kidnappings and mass displacement. “My uncle ran away from the village because these people asked him to give them money to buy guns and bullets,” one man from Imo state told the BBC. 🌍 Researchers are trying to establish whether one-horned creatures, found in rock art and rock paintings, existed in southern Africa. Critics have argued that the prominence of unicorns in European culture spread to other parts of the world during colonialism and influenced the beliefs of the indigenous people. However, “European colonial ideas encountered older indigenous beliefs about one-horned creatures,” writes David Witelson in The Conversation. Witelson, whose research is based on rock paintings by the San in South Africa, adds that the “rock paintings of one-horned creatures can’t be dismissed as naturalistic profile views of two-horned creatures.” |
