The African Anthropologist is the official journal of the Pan-African Anthropological Association. It is published biannually by CODESRIA on behalf of the Association. The journal is planning to produce a special issue focusing on ‘sexuality’. We hereby invite contributions on various aspects of sexuality.

Guest Speakers: Denis Goldberg, Sipho Pityana, Eusebius McKaiser and Richard Calland.

So far this year 14 schools have been burnt down in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, northern Nigeria, forcing over 7,000 children out of formal education and pushing down enrolment rates in an already ill-educated region. In a video posted on YouTube in February, Boko Haram, the Islamic jihadist group based in Nigeria, called on their followers to destroy schools providing Western education.

Activists have sent another letter to Cepheid, the manufacturer of the revolutionary GeneXpert multi-drug resistant TB diagnostic machine, urging them to bring down the price of their products so that more people can access this lifesaving test.

Africa is not cashing in enough from its large gold resources, despite the spiralling price of the precious metal over recent years, according to a working paper published by the African Development Bank (AfDB). The paper, entitled ‘Gold Mining in Africa: Maximizing Economic Returns for Countries’, points out that gold mining is a significant activity in at least 34 of the continent’s 54 countries. A key factor is unfair concession agreements, say the authors of the paper, which severely limit the gains from gold mining that remain in the producing countries. This particularly applies to the royalty rate stated in the agreements.

A new report from the Auditor General’s office shows that there is need for close to 3,000 lecturers and others in more senior positions in the four of the five public universities. Universities with grave demand for more academic staff include Makerere, Gulu, Mbarara and Kyambogo. In some public universities, the academic staffing is even below half of what is required by the National Council for Higher Education. To make it worse, the few dons in public universities are quitting for jobs in well-paying private and foreign universities and non-academic jobs.

'My job as a poet is to wake myself up and take responsibility for learning the truth. That means doing hard work, looking beyond headlines, being willing to interrogate data, structures, systems.'

A discourse of international governance is in the making. Yet market logic like ‘carbon trading’, ‘geo-engineering’, or ‘climate smart agriculture’ cannot restore broken life-support-systems in nature.

Teachers in Swaziland defied a government ban on their meeting and called a two-day strike. More than 300 members of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) met in Manzini where they decided to strike on 9 and 10 May 2012, to demand a 4.5 per cent salary increase.

Fahamu is commissioning an evaluation of its pilot Pan African Fellowship Program. The evaluation will establish the extent to which the initiative contributed to the strengthening of social justice activism in Kenya by developing the knowledge and experiences of fellows who are community based activists, their affiliate organisations and movements, the host organisations and others who were involved in the program. Interested individuals are requested to send in their applications for consideration as Consultants by close of business on Wednesday May 2, 2012.

(Jakarta, 2 March 2012) April 17 is the International Day of Peasant Struggle, commemorating the massacre of 19 peasants struggling for land and justice in Brazil in 1996. Every year on that day actions take place around the world in defence of peasants and small-scale farmers struggling for their rights.

March 29 was a sad day... We lost Adrienne Rich, one of the most inspiring poets we were blessed with. She gave our dreams a soul called social justice.

She is one of the most influential poets of the late 20th century.

The East Africa Association of Grantmakers (EAAG) is elated to announce the call for nominations for the inaugural East Africa Philanthropy Awards (EAPA) 2012. Launched in 2011, the Awards seek to identify, recognize and celebrate outstanding contributions of individuals and organizations to strategic social development and to the growth of the philanthropic movement in East Africa.

Pambazuka Press is able to offer three months' unpaid work experience to a part-time, Oxford-based volunteer who would like to gain experience of working in a small, hard-working publishing team, mainly on marketing and promotions.

The 2012 Conference focuses on building the type of leadership Africa needs to successfully face challenges in the 21st century. The conference will bring together young and emerging academics, students, entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians to discuss and debate the challenges of the day in Africa.

A catalogue of failures by Nato warships and European coastguards led to the deaths of dozens of migrants left adrift at sea, according to a damning official report into the fate of a refugee boat in the Mediterranean whose distress calls went unanswered for days. A nine-month investigation by the Council of Europe – the continent's 47-nation human rights watchdog, which oversees the European court of human rights – has unearthed human and institutional failings that condemned the boat's occupants to their fate.

The births of tens of thousands of children during Côte d'Ivoire's eight-year rebellion were not formally recorded. While many families take a lax attitude towards registering new babies, the gaps in birth and other records are particularly serious in the central, northern and western parts of Côte d'Ivoire, where government functions were effectively suspended by the rebellion between 2002 and 2010. As children born during this period move up through the school system, they have run into problems.

The Times of Swaziland censored itself when it reported Wikileaks was asking people in the kingdom to leak documents to its website. The Times, the only independent daily newspaper in Swaziland, reported 26 March that Wikileaks asked people to send it documents relating to the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), a banned organisation in Swaziland where King Mwsati III rules as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch. But, what it did not report was that Wikileaks had a higher priority from Swaziland than PUDEMO on its wanted-information list: ‘Expense accounts of King Mswati, the Queen Mother and the King's wives.’

It is the pleasure of the Masters programs at the American University of Paris to host an international and bilingual conference on contemporary critical and experimental engagement with Frantz Fanon’s work, co-organized by Lisa Damon, Sousan Hammad and François Huguet.
The conference will take place at AUP and at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien and is open to everyone.