The conference will be hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), and the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa (GALA), and The Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 22-25 June 2003.

“Music is the weapon of the future,” said Fela Kuti. Apt then that a new album, 'Red Hot + Riot' (www.redhotriot.com), released in October 2002, is not only a tribute to the songs and spirit of the Nigerian musician but also the latest use of popular culture in the fight against AIDS. Moreover, the release has added poignancy as Fela Kuti, perhaps the most influential African musician of the 20th century, died of AIDS-related illness in 1997.

When the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka fled Nigeria in 1994, and was sentenced to death in absentia by the military regime of Sani Abacha in 1997, he likened the "liminal but dynamic" state of the writer in exile to a parachutist's free fall. His limbo was ostensibly ended by Abacha's sudden death from a heart attack in 1998 and Nigeria's steps towards democracy. Yet for Soyinka, whose 1970s prison memoir famously proclaimed that "the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny", there can be no true home without justice.

This 119-page report, entitled Playing with Fire: Weapons Proliferation, Political Violence, and Human Rights in Kenya, documents the dangerous nexus between arms availability and ethnic attacks in Kenya. The report highlights politically instigated armed violence on Kenya's coast during the last general election cycle, in 1997. Human Rights Watch describes in detail the armed political violence in Kenya's Coast Province in mid-1997 and the role of ruling-party officials in stoking the violence. A quasi-military force of well-organized and well-armed attackers carried out brutal attacks on civilians from other ethnic groups in areas around Mombasa, Coast Province.

An American academic has vowed to send a further four million books to South Africa as part of an ongoing drive to fight illiteracy. Dr Julius Wayne Dudley, who was in the country last week, made the announcement while visiting institutions and projects that benefited from his drive and his organisation, Collaborative Education with South Africans.

Are you an artist? Do you want your artwork to be seen in 1500 communities around the world? Do you have an image that the HIV/AIDS community can benefit from? If the answer is Yes, then participate in the Candlelight Memorial Poster Contest. The Global Health Council is inviting anyone interested to participate in the Candlelight Memorial 2003 Poster Contest. We are asking individuals to submit artwork that addresses this year's theme of remembrance and renewal.

This book explores the emergence of the award-winning Niyi Osundare, a modern Nigerian poet. It looks at how Osundare started in Ikere-Ekiti as a "farmer-born, peasant-bred" oral singer to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated African poets. Osundare has won the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Award, the Japanese sponsored Noma Award, and the Folon-Nichols award. He also accepted a Honoris Causa of the prestigious Université de Toulouse le Mirial in France. In this book, Osundare’s various perspectives on literature and contemporary African literary criticism are examined. The inner rhythms of his own poetic agenda are also explored in depth.

The publication of a two-volume evaluation study, Adjustment in Africa, by the World Bank in 1994 sparked major controversies and re-ignited the debate about the direction of Africa’s development. For most African scholars, who live in and study these economies, the World Bank reports were yet another major disjuncture between reality and dogma. This book is a response to the need for critical appraisal of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) as a development strategy. The failure of SAP, the simplistic diagnosis and tendentious performance evaluation of the 1994 report, and what seems to be a changed African environment that is more permissive of alternative viewpoints, has convinced Africans to re-enter the debate. There is a growing call for "local ownership" of adjustment and for Africans to assume the leading role in defining the continent’s future.

In David Rieff's latest book, 'A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis ' the author supposes: What if this (humanitarian) revolution is really a comforting and self-flattering fantasy? What if the rise of the humanitarian movement actually conceals the fact that the world is getting bloodier even as its values get better, and that humanitarian action amounts to little more than putting Band-Aids on a malignant tumor? For the author, in order for humanitarianism to function in this evolving and complicated environment, it has to be neutral or it is nothing.

Zulu painter Ernest Mancoba, exiled in France since 1938, has died in hospital at Clamart near Paris aged 98, his family said on Sunday.

South Africa's best black rugby player has prompted uproar by denouncing the national sport as a bastion of white supremacy which faked multiracial harmony to host the 1995 world cup with Nelson Mandela's blessing.

Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who made history as Africa's first Nobel Laureate in Literature, last week became the first African writer to win the coveted Italian Vita di Poeta prize.

"Passport to Dignity," a human rights workbook, provides a comprehensive framework of the Beijing Platform for Action and recounts particular examples of women's initiatives throughout the world. It also has exercises that guide readers through a path of personal and group reflection on how to use human rights as a tool for systemic analysis, and social and economic transformation.

The two friends sit nursing their cold beers and cursing their luck. They are both victims of corruption, a curse that is no longer part of the system but has become the system in Kenya. Bus owner Emmanuel Wenani has just paid £65 to retrieve one of his vehicles from the police yard. It was impounded after he failed to pay the daily ‘tax’ of £3 to police officers on the route. His friend Tony Nakosi is still smarting after handing over £8 for a copy of his own birth certificate - a service that is supposed to be free.

In this new CD-ROM African ICT entrepreneurs talk about what it means to start up a company, what kind of personal qualities you need and the type of mistakes they made that you can easily avoid. The CD-ROM looks at the kind of ICT ideas that have fuelled the growth of the ICT sector across the continent and highlights a number of recent examples to give you a flavour of what you might come up with. It contains information on how to plan a business idea, how to mobilise finance and the role of partnerships.

Water Wars, by environmental thinker and activist Vandana Shiva, explores the legal and theoretical issues surrounding the rapid diminishing of this most precious resource. Awarded the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, Shiva is one of the most far-reaching and hopeful thinkers on the left today. Blue Gold, by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke - probably North America’s foremost water experts - is a nearly encyclopedic companion, cataloging challenges to water worldwide. The two books provide a chilling, in-depth examination of a rapidly emerging global crisis. “Quite simply,” Barlow and Clarke write, “unless we dramatically change our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe fresh water shortages within the next quarter-century. … The hard news is this: Humanity is depleting, diverting and polluting the planet’s fresh water resources so quickly and relentlessly that every species on earth—including our own—is in mortal danger.”

"Art is usually designed for places that exclude the folks from dwellings like Bessengue. If some artists sometimes think about them it is usually done in their name, without really involving the populations. The idea that art could be instrumental in shaping what they would call development, is brought by the populations of Bessengue themselves through their development committee. Art does not pretend here to solve problems. It simply works to shape visions."

Chimurenga is an advertising-free self-funded journal of arts, culture, politics and the bedroom relations that these enjoy around Africa. Chimurenga appears 4 times a year, including one special edition.

This book is a biography of Josiah Tshangana Gumede, the ANC leader most credited with cementing the ANC's longstanding relationship to the Soviet Union. The "dustheap of South African historiography" has claimed a number of casualties, one being JT Gumede. He is more well-known to a later generation as the father of Archie Gumede, one of the past presidents of the now-defunct United Democratic Front. The book surveys his controversial career as an African political leader in the early 20th century, as a civil rights leader and leading opponent of racial injustice and points to his historical importance.

Many of these sixty-seven poems deal with coming to terms with the long period of military rule and kleptocracy in Nigeria, and the effects on its citizens' psyches. A kind of absurd theatre is the poet's metaphor for these memories, and forms the structure of his work. The poems are grouped into acts and scenes, and the final 'chorus' act includes poems from other poets who have inspired this poet's work, notably Tanure Ojaide.