For more than 40 years, Morocco has forcefully and illegally occupied Western Sahara despite provisions of international law that recognize the country’s sovereignty. The suffering but resolute Saharawi people, especially the younger generation, are getting impatient with endless colonialism. African people and all who value human dignity and freedom must stand up in solidarity with Western Sahara by demanding an end to Moroccan occupation.

A family in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa has been battling with the African Union over a piece of property in the past five years. But the family’s predicament is only a small part of a wider struggle under a soulless system that has little regard for the lives of its people.

Ethiopia is in the grip of a famine once again, bringing to mind the shameful images of hunger splashed around the world by western media in 1984. But Ethiopians are not helpless. They have the power to act: not only to end hunger but also to give the world dignified representations of their own crisis.

The video production/story is around women and FGM. The video narrative is an amalgamation of many women's stories. The story is created under the notion that "it takes a village to tell a woman's story; it takes a village for a woman's voice to be heard." The work is part of a wider project entitled "Dear Mother" created by Daapo Reo. .

To the rest of the world, they are merely statistics of persons drowned at sea while trying to reach Europe in illegal voyages. But these are real human beings, with complex lives, pursuing a dream.

Ethiopia’s rich heritage in music immortalized in vinyl records is vanishing into the international collector scene alongside other artifacts. There is a need to reclaim and honor the vinyl classics as part of the ancient nation’s cultural memory.

The United Nations says one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or abused by a partner in her lifetime. Women are increasing resisting.

Varying Western mainstream media styles of reporting on Ebola confirm how narratives are spaces of domination. The African Ebola patient is classically “othered” and portrayed as a villain and perpetrator, while the American Ebola patient is depicted as a victim.

This film by an Israeli director about albino killings in Tanzania is replete with Western stereotypes about the African savage, without any historical or political context

Words in a poem, in reaction to the abducted Chibok girls; there are many more such stories around the world. It is dedicated to women and girls suffering from similar or same circumstances. At the same time, I am compelled to add to this, words from Amina Mama delivered in a speech at the AU’s 50th anniversary: "Let us make it clear to the world that violence and tolerance of violence are not endemic, not an “African tradition”, nor simply what black men do to women. Rather they are the results of systemic injustices."

Amira Ali takes a critical look at the reconstructed identities of East African women along western political imagination. The identities, as expressed in hip-hop lyrics, objectify women from the region as being quite not African, amplifying the myths of western anthropologists of the past

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni recently signed a law that outlaws miniskirts in the east African nation. This poet attempts to make sense of the new law

The young man articulated the frustration, fragility, despair and aspiration of so many young-black-men. He spoke for the many who strive to better their life by attempting to gain the ability to negotiate with a system that has socialized, marginalized, and institutionalized them with a misrepresented identity

Though little acknowledged, one year prior to the founding of the OAU, Pan African Women’s Organization was formed in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It could be said that PAWO was the building block, the impetus, for the establishment of the OAU

No matter how vibrant the so-called modern world is and how much technological development exists, it is still be over-shadowed by the impoverished and neglected world within it

In all my years in the United States and there are a few cultural tendencies I still have not been able to get used to: bagels, children talking back or ‘sassing’ their parents, and public acts of defaming a parent or sibling

How do you holler
And not be heard
A fury of injustice
That has numbed us stern

Fury killed a dream
Killed the kid
Who dreams football on streets
Caught in the axis
Tragedy and injustice

To the world
Ain’t nothin’ but a thing
Call it an –ism
Euphemism has a name for it
Collateral damage
Isn’t that what they call it?

An explicit offense
Made inoffensive
Tragic called the kid
Dream gunned on the street
Football
His dream
His defense
For street dreams

For the explicit offender
The dream
Dealt on a kid
Dealt on misdeed
Unnamed coffin
That was the end of the kid

The world should be
On bended knees
Crying out life
How hollow is the prize
Dealt on a kid
Living on
Dreams…
Football…
Streets…

© afrodisiatic expression

'Man dreams
of far away lands
unknown,
thoughts yearnin'
of unconcealed gems
to fetch and be fetch'd,

to reach the field
of the unknown
but to be desecrat'd
by projects
of food stamps and sorts
yet unknown...'

Who we are is a question that requires constant inward contemplation merged with the outside - negotiating between two worlds - for knowing is paramount in affirming our existence and freedom. Who we are is a self-orientation of where we have been and the direction we are heading in, realizing that we cannot be anything unless (Sartre: 2007) others acknowledging us as such or may be not. The big business in the quest of identity - socially constructed, contingent, and performatively constituted - is in fact shaped by personal experiences, the formation of oneself within hegemonic social conditions undistinguished between the personal and the political or between private and public spaces.

Amira Ali's 'Speak no more – let us just make music', originally published in issue (491) – – is now available as a [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.