“CAF should have rescheduled it to benefit everyone,” said Ghanaian defender Linda Eshun. “They rescheduled the men’s game. I know we can’t compare the money that’s involved in the men’s [to that in the] women’s game. But I am not saying CAF are biased towards the men’s game.”
Nigeria’s goalkeeper Tochukwu Oluehi wasn’t as diplomatic. “CAF doesn’t take women’s football seriously. Why cancel the African Women’s Championship? 2022 is too far. Teams won’t be tested. We don’t play friendlies, we won’t keep fit. They should have postponed it to next year. It doesn’t sound good that there won’t be competitions until then,” said Oluehi.
CAF secretary general Abdelmounaïm Bah downplayed the impact of the tournament’s cancellation. “I’m not sure that cancelling this edition of the Women’s Afcon will have a bad impact on the performance of our teams,” he said in a virtual press conference with the South African Football Journalists’ Association.
“What we are trying to put in play is a clear strategy to develop women’s football in Africa. We care about women’s football. We want to see better results at the international level. We want to develop women’s football. We want professional leagues, this is why we have this strategy. We want to give more opportunities for girls and women to play.”
The Women’s Champions League will be contested by eight teams in two groups of four. Each of the six CAF zones – north zone, zone west A, zone west B, central zone, central-east zone and southern zone – will host qualifiers to decide who will represent the region. The six winners, along with a team from the host nation, and an additional club, will make up the eight representatives. The tournament will be held annually in the second half of the year, giving players more exposure and tougher competition.
“CAF doesn’t take women Football Seriously”
Waliya new boss called in 40 players to camp
Waliya new boss Wubetu Abate kicked off his preparation for African Cup qualification campaign calling 40 players into camp. In addition to players past their prime including midfielder Dawit Estifanos, the absence of all internationals but Egypt based Shimeles Bekele threw football fans into curiosity.
Less than two months from his debut international match as a national coach, Wubetu summoned 40 players including five goalkeepers to report to Ethiopian Youth Academy, the camp where the preparation is said to take place.
Back from six months layoff due to Covid19 Pandemic, Wubetu faced the hardest setback of all time for he is in the blind about current status of his players. To tackle that challenge Wubetu opted calling as much as 40 players for his preliminary selection process.
One of the rising regional football force Fasil Ketema stands first with nine of its players called to camp while record champions Kidus Giorgis and popular side Ethiopia Bunna each coming up with eight and seven players respectively.
As usual there is a wide range of opinion on which players deserve their place, which players are living off their reputation and so on. In line with that thirty plus midfielder Dawit Estifanos, consistently inconsistent even at club level Mesoud Mohammed and less than ten appearances in his two years with Kidus Giorgis, Getaneh Kebede are the few that are called eyebrows from football fans. Whatever happens, Wubetu is sure to be criticized from some side, but won’t be the first to deal with an equal hostile press and fan base.
Five goalkeepers, 11 defenders, another 11 midfielders and 13 strikers, Wubetu appears to have a wide pool of players’ to select and get them ready for the qualification to be held at the final week of November.
ART ACTIVISM One For All and All For One
“Our act aimed to erase the acts of indignity and disrespect of those who plundered our homes.”
Artist Mwazulu Diyabanza
Often European museums position themselves as preservers and protectors of art, culture and history, particularly as it relates to Africa. If you’re a betting person, you can bet your bottom dollar, as the old adage goes, that 99.9999% of these artifacts were not gifted to these museums, instead were looted from Africa, centuries ago, with no regard for the impact on the peoples or progeniture. Under recent fire is the Musee Du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac Africa Collections boasting 70,000 objects from “Sub-Sahara Africa…the first voyages of exploration to Africa, for example to the Congo…(where) the development of ethnography was accompanied from the 1930’s by field collection expeditions, one of the most well-known of which was the Dakar-Djibouti expedition. Also, from this period onwards, colonial administrators as well as collectors and merchants became major actors in the enrichment of the museum collections,” reads the Museum’s website. Really? The museum website further explains about the “democratization of the collection” emphasizing “one of the most important priorities of the museum” is ensuring access to the museum through “true collaboration” highlighting outreach to even people in hospitals and retirement homes. There is no mention of reaching out to Africans, from whom the items were stolen, even the millions of African migrants in France enduring racism. Seriously? You can steal OUR people’s artifacts then say you are committed to democratizing it for YOUR people, with a straight face?
Well Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, loosely translated in English meaning Unity, Dignity and Courage of the Browns, has no longer left this return of looted artifacts to the slow boat known as diplomacy. They are committed to African Nationalism emphasizing the recovery and re-appropriation for liberation and restoration of African wealth; and African Socialism towards the construction of African society based on African power and values. Their unapologetic mandate fuels the organization’s determination to get back Africa’s artifacts, by any means necessary. Mid-June, amidst Black Lives Matter protests, a real-life Black Panther type opening scene was played out by artist/activist from the Congo, Mwazulu Diyabanza, who tried to retrieve a looted 19th century African funeral pole. Obviously Diyabanza and fellow protestors arrested for the act knew they would not be able to walk out of the museum with their historic treasure, but risked arrest to make a point. They wanted to bring attention to one of the long list of heinous offences against Africans by the French and other European powers for that matter.
During the trial held in France on September 29th five arrested from the group remained defiant in the face of a charge of attempted theft. But it was not just five defiant defendants on trial but the horrible history of France, accused of looting a large collection of well over 90,000 ceremonial and artistic artifacts. Dubbed a “failed repatriation attempt” in the Smithsonian magazine, the prestigious US entity has also seen its fair share of protests including initial opposition to a RasTafari exhibition led by yours truly in early 2000’s. But that’s another story. Artist Diyabanza said, “Our act aimed to erase the acts of indignity and disrespect of those who plundered our homes.” It’s personal! Too often we treat these issues with diplomacy and decorum but after decades of discussions, met with vitriolic and condescending remarks from the French, often defending the “hosting” of these items, enough is enough.
It is high time for not only repatriation of Africa’s artifacts but reparations to help build state of the art museums and programs in Africa with enough funding and resources to “democratize”, ensuring access for all Africans especially in rural areas where many of these items have immense significance and purpose. While England holds many of Ethiopia’s treasures, France also has a few, which is an understatement and Ethiopians should remain vigilant for the return of the many treasures, holding these partner/donor countries accountable, without fear. There comes a time when the axiom, “stand for something or fall for anything” must be applied. This is about heritage as much as it is about the future. In a time when we grapple with manufactured discourse on identity rather than the celebration of diversity, the day will come when generations from now will ask what meant the most to us in the 21st century and what were we willing to sacrifice life and limb for. Future historians should be able to find a society led by vigilant and committed leaders who would not sit by instead they stood with artists, activist and academicians working unceasingly to retrieve our most precious historical items for posterity. Let us see if post Covid era Ethiopia and all African states will join arms to act as one voice to retrieve, protect and preserve our heritage and hence our dignity. Lights, camera, action…
Dr. Desta Meghoo is a Jamaican born
Creative Consultant, Curator and cultural promoter based in Ethiopia since 2005. She also serves as Liaison to the AU for the Ghana based, Diaspora African Forum.
How many of our beloved ones we lost to irregular migration? … Identified in just a number with their graves left unnamed
By Kenaw Gebreselassie
For Lampedusa, the small Italian island city at the Mediterranean Sea with a charming scenery, the memory of the 3rd October 2013 tragedy that claimed the lives of 368 African migrants, the vast majority of them Eritreans, is still fresh. Apparently, there has been nothing different that could have erased this misery. The city is still experiencing an incessant flow of migrants to its coast and news of death associated with this is almost an everyday incidence.
Even this year as the world, Europe in particular, is heavily hit and shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic, desperate migrants do keep on making a deadly journey to the coast of Italy, crossing the Mediterranean Sea by shaky boats, departing mainly from Libya and Tunisia. Aljazeera has recently reported nearly 8000 Tunisians arrived in Sicily up to August 31, 2020 a number almost six times higher than the same period last year. On August 31, more than 360 people were rescued at sea and brought to Lampedusa. The pandemic couldn’t even curve it as the people and politicians in host and transit countries may have expected.
A year ago in October, invited by Europe based ‘Snap Shots from the Boarders’ project through Amref Health Africa-Italy, I grabbed the opportunity to attend events that marked the 6thyear’s anniversary of, the symbolic Mediterranean tragedy in Lampedusa. During my two days in one of the smallest cities in Italy, I could see in the daily conversation, be it formal or informal, of the elites and the public at large, in their art works, paintings and photography, that the 2013 shipwreck was still fresh in their mind. The stories and figures I happened to hear; the images (photos and video) I happened to watch, the discussions I showed up were all highlighting the endless dramatic incidents in the Mediterranean Sea, making it the ‘sea of death’ as much as the ‘sea of life’.
“The Mediterranean Sea was a sea of life, not a sea of death,” Toto Marello, the Mayor of Lampedusa remarked as he spoke to the gathering in one of the events. I witnessed both. A short walk by the sea in the island of Lampedusa would give you a glimpse of stirring images of life – people at the beach enjoying; fishers fishing for their daily meal and sell; some just sailing their boats for fun and others on their bikes riding by the sea, and many more. Again, a short talk with someone would, on the other hand, bring you stories of plights of impoverished migrants mainly from Africa, which I could hardly be eager to hear. To my shock and grief, it was reported nearly 18,000 migrants perished trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea between October 2013 and 2019.
More than the figures, what left me in a deeper grief was the Memorial inauguration where we had a night gathering around 3pm to tribute those drowned in the dark blue sea of the Mediterranean six years ago, and thereby pronounce “Never Again”, a cliché that is put forth again and again everywhere a similar crisis occurs.
Standing there close to the Memorial in silence, and struggling to stifle my tears as I scanned through a long list of names of young brothers and sisters from Eritrea and Ethiopia was a distressing experience. It was even more aching to see survivors walking round the monument and looking on names of fallen compatriots. Some of them may have come from the same village, fled together and died together.
I was particularly touched by one of the young men, who, screwing up his eyes, stared right at his brother’s name; the name he would fondly call as brothers grown up together under the same roof. He could make it to Europe, but his brother couldn’t, which tells loud about the fate of most of irregular migrants.
The compelling stories shared at the night gathering of the memorial inauguration by Eritrean survivors, the commemorative march to the ‘Gate of Europe’; the voyaging to the site where the shipwreck happened and the flower placing ceremony on the stretch of water were all heart breaking and alarming.
These our brothers and sisters rested in various cemeteries in Lampedusa as unidentified migrants as if they never had a home country, families, and names. They were identified only with a number as an unknown human beings, with their graves unnamed. “I wanted to give a name to these human beings, men, women and children that after their death have been buried in various cemeteries and identified only with a number, the indifference of that night has made that dawn never come for them,” Vito Fiorino, the designer of the statue, put a note near the Memorial.
I wonder what our leaders could have felt had they been standing there at the Memorial, with their eyes walking through the names of the deceased (names collected later). I honestly wonder how they could have reacted had they been on board in one of the boats surfing towards the stretch of water where the flower putting ceremony conducted in honor of the lives lost, those nationals fleeing the countries they rule. Any regrets? Could they have blamed themselves for their indifference to the fates of their youth as Vito may have blamed the Italian authorities for their indifference to the migrants’ lives regrettably lost, as rescuing was possible as many still argue? Could they have accused themselves of not being able to create an enabling environment for their young people to live in freedom and peace, to work and thrive?
When will this misfortune end?
The sad truth is even now our people, young men, women and children are dying trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea; suffering at detention centers in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and in several other corners of the world. From the many unending sequence of migration crisis, and the suffering of African migrants’, the latest has come from Saudi Arabia, where thousands of Ethiopian migrants are detained in a hellish center, as echoed by several international media.
With the recent inhuman treatment of the Ethiopian migrant workers in this oil-rich Arab nation, the lives lost during migration has again hit headlines of the world’s media, and become the concern of many. For several months, the migrants have been locked in small detention centers, leading some of them to choose to die by taking their own lives. The incident has been concealed from the eyes of the world until the migrants managed to smuggle out photos and videos they shot and share with the media. As soon as the stories and images were published, they went viral, causing anger and outrage among human rights activities and even authorities of the countries from which the migrants have come. These human beings are again the lives we are failing to protect and save.
As we condemn such a dehumanizing action by those who lack compassion and any sense of humanity, at home it is also important to question our governments’ stance and challenge their indifference to the rights of their nationals abroad. Most important of all is, however, holding the governments accountable for failing to make their own countries better places for citizens to live and work.
Migration is not a crisis and its drivers are manifold. It has now increasingly been seen as a triple win solution, bringing benefits to destination countries, origin countries and the migrants themselves. In this regard, the initiative made by partners of the ‘Snap Shots from the Boarders’ (www.snapshotsfromtheborders.eu) project looks encouraging, if not promising, to alter the migration narrative towards this new shift. The project, which brings together several actors in European countries, has been campaigning for a shift on the migration narrative that could give rise to a platform towards human rights-based approach to migration and development, fostering strong linkages among communities; and migrants as a new human development actors. Under the ‘No More Bricks in the Wall’ banner, the project makes efforts to reframe the way many perceive migration and migrants and bring about positive changes in the European policy and decision makers, opinion leaders and citizens’ attitudes.
It is interesting that at the 6th year’s anniversary of the 2013 disaster at the Italian coast, the project came up with a new petition that called for EU institutions to proclaim the 3rd of October as “European Day of Memory and Welcome”, which can be weighted as a milestone to get the change in the migration narrative off the ground. I believe the change will come about with awareness and understanding of European policy and decision makers, opinion leaders and every EU citizen about global migration and pushing factors that determine migration flows although there are several reasons for me to believe otherwise.
I have also high hopes in Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations where hundreds of thousands migrant workers are exploited and heartlessly abused, positive voices on migration and migrants will come out to help stop the violations once and for all. What follows, which I am longing for, could be a ‘Day of Memory and Welcome’ and stories of change in these countries as well. What might make more sense, of course, is urging government and non-government actors at the home country to work towards curving irregular migration flows of any sort to other countries and protecting the rights of their citizens working and living overseas, and then setting our hopes on the realization of these meaningful move.
