Akina Mama wa Afrika has published a ‘transformational’ new book 'When I Dare to Be Powerful', a collection of herstories of five women engaged in sex work in East Africa. Its author Zawadi Nyong’o shares the surprised reaction of audiences at the launch of the book, during the 4th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights, which took place in Addis Ababa in February.

For the nearly 50 million people of South Africa, the 2010 World Cup represents an opportunity to show the world its progress through sports. But for a new nonprofit organisation, soccer's biggest stage also offers an opportunity to publicise young women who tend to go unheard.

Pambazuka News talks to Sokari Ekine, editor of ‘SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa’. She discusses the role of technology in creating social change and asserts that technology's role is as a tool; it cannot facilitate change on its own: ‘the driving force behind social change is ideas and the search for solutions and easier ways of doing things... Technologies are not developed in isolation to the political, social and economic structures in which we live. They are a reflection of these...’

South Africa's antiretroviral treatment guidelines have been updated. The guidelines offer a range of improvements over the 2004 guidelines including new, more tolerable antiretrovirals, immediate ARV treatment for drug-resistant TB patients and improved prevention of mother to child transmission procedures.

While excitement around South Africa's forthcoming World Cup continues to build, South Africa's poor are seeing none of the supposed economic benefits associated with hosting the tournament, argue Azad Essa and Oliver Meth.

‘It’s one thing to have a secret manual for Nigerian rulers,’ writes Firoze Manji, ‘but quite another to have one that provides the recipe for class rule by the rogues and rascals that roam the rest of the continent. This short pamphlet should have been banned long ago.’

Jamie Pitman reviews Raj Patel's new book 'The Value of Nothing,' which he finds to be 'excellently written, passionate and engaging'.

EG Justice Needs Your Help.

now to STOP the UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for the Life Sciences.

In 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) created the UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for the Life Sciences, named for and financed by the autocratic and abusive president of the oil-rich West African country of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

The prize is said to recognize 'scientific achievements that improve the quality of human life.' Meanwhile, the quality of life in Equatorial Guinea today remains abysmal. In spite of having attained the highest GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa, 60 per cent of Equatoguineans live on less than US$1 a day in conditions comparable to Haiti or Chad. President Obiang has neglected to invest available resources in basic social services, resulting in declining primary school attendance, poor health indicators, and needless poverty.

The UNESCO Obiang Prize is a cynical ploy to co-opt the worthy name and reputation of UNESCO to enhance the image of a notorious dictatorship. The prize amounts to international approval for this kleptocratic and abusive regime and it undermines UNESCO’s mission to promote education, science, culture, and human rights.

You can help, by signing this petition to UNESCO!

Let’s send a message to UNESCO that corruption and abuse should not be rewarded and that funds used to create this prize should be reinvested in the people of Equatorial Guinea.

The press conference celebrating 100 days before the World Cup kick-off left the big question unanswered, argues Azad Essa: How will South Africans benefit from the World Cup? For Essa ‘only the dim-witted, government or FIFA communication officers walked away feeling that the World Cup was really about anything more than ending Afro-pessimism and stroking a couple of shiny suits'.

The ‘magic’ of Daniel Mandishona's ‘White Gods, Black Demons’ is that ‘it feels startlingly familiar’, writes Bella Matambanadzo. Another book to add to the ‘treasure trove’ of literature on the Zimbabwean question, each portrait in Mandishona’s anthology of short stories is ‘the product of prodigious observation and research’, writes Matambanadzo. ‘What a reader will cherish is that there is a kind of fidelity about the stories that leaves you knowing it to be true', while healthy 'doses of candour give breadth and wisdom, to what is a collection of comic tragedy told with tenderness'.

Firoze Manji praises Adam Parsons’ style and his powerful descriptions of the lives, experiences and aspirations of the shackdwellers of Kibera, but argues that ‘Mega-slumming’ is very much written from a vantage point that serves to reinforce Western prejudices of Africa. Parsons portrays Africans ‘as objects of pity, for whom charity is needed’ and Manji argues that he does so because he has chosen only one lens to view the lives of these people through. Manji asserts that ‘A little bit of research would… have revealed to him that residents of Kibera have organised politically, have given voice to their demands, fought battles to have the right to organise, organised meetings, demonstrations, produced plays, music, poetry and writings of protest.’ He concludes that the writings of these people reveal a very different world to the one that Parsons portrays: A world of change.

Rwandan nurses will soon be authorized to start HIV-positive patients on life-prolonging antiretroviral treatment (ART), a move Ministry of Health officials say will speed up the rollout of ART in the East African nation.

We, the undersigned Equatoguinean and international scholars and professionals write to you with the hope that UNESCO will reconsider its decision to establish the UNESCO-Obiang Nguema International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, and abolish this award named for and funded by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.

James Kilgore discusses the background to his new novel,'We Are All Zimbabweans Now', the story of an American graduate history student who travels to Zimbabwe in the 1980s with an 'idealised picture of Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwean notion of racial reconciliation'. The book attempts to provide a more 'nuanced' view of the country's history, says Kilgore, and invites readers, as its protagonist does, to interrogate their 'own assumptions and theories'.

Lennox Odiemo-Munara provides us with a taste of ‘Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing’, which revisits the winning short stories and those by other renowned writers of African literature. Odiemo-Munara concludes that as the Caine Prize enters its second decade, ‘we are certainly sure of marvelling the more at the grounding of a… literary tradition of a continent. It is a tradition that… “will bring many unsuspected gifts and wonderful surprises to the world in the fullness of time”.’

Roland Bankole Marke reviews 'Weh Dehn Say? Dehn Say Kapu Sehns Nor Kapu Word', a collection of Sierra Leonean literature which he regards as 'a priceless addition to any library'.

Many HIV-positive African patients are starting treatment too late for it to be effective, new scientific studies have shown. Studies from South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe presented at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco (ending 19 February), all found late enrolment of patients on life-prolonging antiretroviral treatment (ART) to be a significant barrier to treatment programmes.

A new documentary portraying a white Zimbabwean farmer’s struggle to resist the unlawful seizure of his land by a senior Zanu PF politician is undermined by its lack of ‘historical and political context’, writes Blessing-Miles Tendi.

The UNESCO Chair & Institute of Comparative Human Rights at the University of Connecticut invites applications for the sixth annual International Leadership Programme: A Global Intergenerational Forum. The Forum seeks to empower young leaders by involving them in finding solutions to emerging human rights problems, and nurturing individuals to be effective leaders in the field of human rights.

was thrilled with a recent review of 'SMS Uprising' featured in