Five years after he made his directorial debut at Sundance, actor and filmmaker Chiwetel Ejiofor returned to the fest Monday with his sophomore feature, Rob Peace. The film is based on Jeff Hobbs’ 2014 book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and tells the true story of a Peace, who grew up in Orange, New Jersey and went on to attend Yale majoring in biochemistry.

In the film, Peace sells marijuana at Yale to earn money that he uses to help overturn his father’s murder conviction, and expresses his desires to return the neighborhood where he grew up.

Speaking ahead of the fest, Ejiofor points out that “within the African American experience, the connection to home, the connection to place, the connection to community is somehow less valid.” He continues: “Anybody who actually tries to reinstitute themselves within that community is somehow failing, on some level.”

THR‘s Sundance review adds to this sentiment, reading,: “Rob didn’t see anything wrong with his community. He had no desire to leave, and part of the tragedy of Rob Peace is that few people seemed to wonder why.”

The film holds parallels — especially a commitment to community — with Ejiofor’s first feature, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. That film tells the true story of a young man in Wimbe, Malawi who refuses to give up on his family farm, devastated by drought and famine, instead building a windmill to restart village’s water pump.

Ejiofor talked to THR about the similarities between his directorial works and the importance of filming on location in New Jersey in New Jersey.

How did you find the book?

I read the book not long after it came out. Robert spoke to me in terms of all of the different intersections that he was dealing with. He’s three years younger than me, and a lot of his experiences, thoughts and feelings, I really related. I felt that I really understood. He felt like a character of my time. It was sort of coincidental that, a few a few years later, Rebecca Hart and Antoine Fuqua approached me having seen my first film, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, about getting involved in the film version of this.

What did you want potential audiences to see in Rob’s story?

He grew up in this period of time where we have this idea of social mobility, and he was at the absolute intersection of education and housing and the criminal justice system. There is this idea of how people move through these spaces and are still true to their own community. Here was this very brilliant young man who is trying to juggle all of these thoughts. Rob was maintaining a full, proper, honest connection to who he was. [He was] able to navigate these complex social spaces that are set up, in some way, to his detriment. He was, to some degree, unable to do this, as well. It really speaks to larger circumstances of race, housing, education, and criminal justice.

There’s still this associated blame placed on people; there’s language and ideology that suggests that an idea of not being able to find your way out. As if, within the African American experience, the connection to home, the connection to place, the connection to community is somehow less valid. What Rob is experiencing and the world that he works in, seems to me, entirely legitimate. And somehow the way that those [communities] are discussed, especially if the community is impoverished, it’s as if escaping that said community is the ultimate goal. And anybody who actually tries to reinstitute themselves within that community is somehow failing, on some level. This is not really applied to any other social or economic or racial group. It is quite specific in the African American communities.

Did you film on location in New Jersey?

It was really important to shoot where all of the things happened, as much as possible. So much of it is centered in that experience of East Orange. We shot in houses in East Orange, and you’re relying hugely on the goodwill of the community, especially when it’s running late, and there’s generators everywhere with blaring lights. People really supported the project, and a lot of people were very aware of Rob and his journey and what happened to him.

How did you find your lead?

It was a difficult process until it becomes very, very simple. For me, it was all about interpretation— how people see how people see Rob. Whether they perceive him as somebody who is trying to fit into these different spaces, or whether they see him as a the same stable, solid, individual who is believably in all of these spaces. That proves to be a sticking point. The perception is that there is a, for want of a better expression, a code switching that people lean into. There is the idea that he was playing up these different parts of his personality, or these different parts of his circumstances, which I didn’t believe was true. He felt very at ease in very different spaces. He felt like he was able to move through different places as one person. Jay [Will] came out of the COVID years at Juilliard, so he didn’t really have a showcase. There were some clips of him from school that you could access online. But as soon as I started to see him interact with this material, I was very aware that he was somebody who was capturing all sides of this character without forcing anything. I just believed him in all of these spaces.

This is you second feature as a director. What did you learn from this production that you will be taking with you into your future directing work?

What really struck me was, when watching the film from the first assembly, I started to see the similarities in both films. There is the ton and pacing of scenes, and similar interpersonal relationships. You become aware, as a writer-director, that these are part of how you see the world and therefore how you relay it, artistically. And you can’t really know that until you start seeing more of your own work. It’s an enjoyable feeling to start to see [the connections] and maybe then, when I’m directing in the future, I will lean more into that.

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By Kevin Fitzpatrick

For three weeks out of the year, Rhode Islanders are afforded the opportunity to celebrate an art so fundamental to the human experience that one might forget it’s an art at all: storytelling.

Funda Fest, now in its 26th year, is an annual exhibition of some of the greatest black story tellers in Rhode Island and beyond. The festival’s storytellers draw from cultural roots in Colonial America, the Caribbean, Mali, South Africa, South Providence, and anywhere one can find members of the black diaspora. And it’s all happening now.

Funda means “to learn” in Zulu. It’s a word Valerie Tutson, executive director and co-founder of Funda Fest and the Rhode Island Black Storytellers (RIBS), which organizes the event every year, brought back with her from a trip to South Africa, during which time she was considering how she might emulate the festivals of the National Association of Black Storytellers here in Rhode Island. With the help of Ramona Bass-Kolobe, an original cast member of the Rites and Reasons Theatre at Brown’s Department of Africana Studies, and other local storytellers, as well as a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, Funda Fest was born.

“Our first year we had invited four artists. And we had one school that we visited and we did two shows,” Tutson said of the festival’s beginnings. “So it was kind of like a little weekend, a long weekend with four artists. This year, we have three weekends all across Rhode Island. And we have more than 26 artists who will be performing.”

RIBS and Funda Fest operated for most of their two decades as a volunteer run non-profit, and while the organization remained solvent for all that time, the turbulence in the country which resulted from both the pandemic and the protests following the killing by police of George Floyd, Tutson and RIBS chose to consider the organization’s longevity.

“I think we got to experience sort of a racial reckoning, and we’re, oh my gosh, what’s happening with black nonprofits in the state?” Tutson asked. “You know, there was this awareness that you know, less than 3% of our nonprofits in Rhode Island are run by people of color.”

In the following years up unto the present, RIBS has taken on a full-time executive director, Tutson, as well as a business manager. In addition to the festival, they now host storytelling camps for kids during February, April, and summer vacations in concert with the Rhode Island Department of Education. They will also be launching a “legacy program” aimed to teach adults storytelling skills.

Tutson herself is an accomplished storyteller with a deep well of cultural memory. She has performed around the country and internationally, drawing on tales of the black experience in American history, and stories from south and west Africa. She sees the role of storytelling in every culture, and particularly in black culture, as essential to learning one’s values and “how to be in the world.”

“Sometimes those historical stories or even the folktales give you real insight into the cultural values that have survived,” Tutson says. “And if we kind of had access to those, I tend to think we wouldn’t be so crazy right now. You know? We would understand our place in humanity, not just our moment in time.”

The inaugural event of Funda Fest 26 was a party held in the Rites and Reasons Theatre, a black box in which many of RIBS’ most prominent members trained, performed, and learned the craft of storytelling. The shadow of one man in particular looms large over the party goers. A man whose name adorns the entrance to the theatre. A man who, during a lull in the music, the storytellers would take time to tell stories about: George Houston Bass.

Ramona Bass-Kolobe was a student at Brown when African American students staged a walkout, demanding a deeper commitment from the university to students of color. She was also a student two years later when Houston Bass, a prolific playwright and director, was hired to teach theatre and Afro-American (now called Africana) Studies. She would also later go on to marry the man.

“This is my womb,” Bass-Kolobe said as she sat in the black box, holding her cane between her legs as her daughter, contemporaries, and former students listened on. “Before I came into this room, and this became my womb, I was part of a group of black students at Brown who were doing black theater and we said ‘Oh, this is black theatre! But we want somebody to come show us the way.’ And so George Houston Bass graciously agreed to come up and guide us on the journey of not just reading plays out of a book, because he told us the plays you need to do are the plays that come out of your people and your mind and your community. And so we said ‘Well, what does that look like?’ And he said ‘Go start doing the research!’”

Houston Bass encouraged his students to go out into the communities of Providence and collect stories, from which they would create performances. From this formula, Rites and Reasons Theatre was born, and the traditions established there would go on to influence the performances seen at Funda Fest today.

Performances like those of Len Cabral, another founder of RIBS, director of Providence Inner City Arts, and 46 years a storyteller. Cabral often works with educators to help them develop storytelling skills as a daily learning aid in the classroom. He was gracious enough to explain his methods during the party. 

“I do the approach of three E’s — entertainment, education, and engagement,” he says. He explains that of the three, the last is most crucial of all. “Without engagement, there’s no entertainment happening. There’s no education … The most important thing is engage your listeners. Then you can take them places.”

“Say I’m telling a story to a group of third-graders,” Cabral continues. “I’ll ask them a question they know the answer to. I’ll say ‘Do rabbits have short or long tails?’ I know they’re gonna say ‘Short!’ And I’ll say ‘Well NOW they do!’ Then I’ll go like this …”

Cabral leans in close, and drops his voice low and, conspiratorially, he begins, “Long ago … Just that movement tells the audience ‘You’re gonna tell us a secret!’”

Cabral will be hosting Funda Fest’s Liar’s Contest this year on Feb. 2 at the Cape Verdean Club in East Providence. The contest is an opportunity for non-professional storytellers to try their hand at spinning a yarn. Participants will have five minutes to tell a family friendly lie, to be judged on Originality, Delivery, and Audience Response, for a first place prize of $200.

Rachel Briggs, an elementary school science teacher in Providence, uses those same skills to enrich and enliven her classes.

 “[Storytelling] can be so useful in the classroom for every subject,” she says. “Every subject, you can break off into a story. Or you get take the information that we’re giving to students and fix it in a way that it creates a story, and it’s so more it more meaningful! When we relate it to something at their age level, it just makes sense, because kids know stories. Whether they’re reading or not they’ll know stories, they can’t help it.”

Briggs often uses her skills as a storyteller and a science teacher to highlight black scientists who haven’t received the celebration they deserve. She gives an example: Granville T. Woods. Woods was an African American inventor who lived during the latter half of the 19th century, who held over 50 patents.

“So I focus on those comprehension questions,” she says of her process. “What, when, where, how, and why do we care about him?”

“I don’t get hung up on dates, because I feel like those are fillers that kids will pick up on later on,” she continues. “What’s more important is who he was. Where he started, in terms of the place and the time and how he got to be the adult he was. His persistence. He was in a time where no black man would be recognized for what he was doing. But he still did it.”

Like Cabral, Briggs says engagement is most important of all, and there’s cognitive science backing the claim. “I was reading this book about culturally responsive teaching, and it turns out the brain, once it gets information, it takes 20 seconds before the brain decides whether or not it will continue engaging in what you’re talking about. So storytelling from the start, you have to be engaging, so that the audience wants to go further with you in the story.”

Briggs performed in the first act of Funda Fest 26’s first evening performance “Storytelling for Grown Folk” at the Southside Cultural Center Of Rhode Island in Providence on Saturday, Jan. 20. She, along with Tutson, Bass-Kolobe, and a few others from RIBS’ “Mothers” each took a turn telling stories from history, or their own lives.

Briggs told an uplifting story about her own choice to rise above the opinions and perceptions of others. Bass-Kolobe told of a trip she took with her husband to Botswana, and her sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous encounters with packs of urban baboons. Tutson took on a story of a woman escaping slavery and her journey from Alabama all the way into Canada with her dog in tow.

Award-winning playwright, poet, and performer David Gonzalez was the evening’s headliner. He chose to perform the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through the lens of 20th century black musicians who had influenced him throughout his life: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee, a long list of those whom he calls “The Real S—.”

Before he began, he apologized for an illness in his throat and what effect it may have on his performance. Then he launched into a perfect, lightning quick stretch of scat and air-saxophone. His retelling of Orpheus, the greatest musician in the world and Eurydice, his wife who was bitten by a snake and snatched away to the underworld on their wedding night, was sharp, elegant, hilarious and tear-wrenching, punctuated with acapella snippets of those musicians he loved so much. He rarely seemed to take a breath and neither did the audience. Engagement, Briggs and Cabral would point out.

“Sometimes I call storytelling ‘poor theater,’” Gonzalez said after the show. “In that we are the orchestra. We are the stage. We are the light. We are the sound. We are the lyricist. We’re the book-writer where, you know, it’s all in there. And my style personally is, you know, I’m coming at music and movement. So I really tried to bring those elements into my voice, into my gestural vocabulary, into creating a world that is sort of theatrically enchanting.”

Speaking more on the thesis of his performance, Gonzales said, “For me, black music has been a guiding light in terms of personal expression, creative courage, discipline, generosity, soulful fun, community and a secular kind of spirituality. You hear somebody like Stevie Wonder, and you hear it, you hear it, hear it in great black music. It’s the integration of spirit and soul, heart, hard work, and it moves through that space.”

Such masters will be putting their craft on display throughout the rest of the festival. Production Manager Marlon Carey is particularly excited to have invited Dr. Amina Blackwood Meeks to perform, in collaboration with the Jamaican Association of Rhode Island.

Meeks is an award-winning writer, actress, storyteller and advocate from Jamaica who was compared by different people at the party to such stars among folklorists as Miss Lou and Zora Neale Hurston. Carey notes she is also an instrumental part of the push to make Jamaican Patois the official language of Jamaica. Meeks will be at multiple events throughout Funda Fest, the first of which will be at an event titled Afro/Caribbean Storytelling in South County South Kingston High School on Jan. 25.

Carey, an immigrant from Jamaica himself living in the United States since childhood, has become an expert on the unique phenomenon of black storytelling in Rhode Island through work with numerous organizations in Providence. He spoke of a project he was hired to do with the Womens’ Project at Brown, for which he had an opportunity to research Rhode Island’s deep embroilment in the Atlantic slave trade.

“Rhode Island was one vertex on the triangle trade,” Carey said. “So this has a rich history of the diaspora.”

He continued, “If more than half of the voyages that left from America to go enslave individuals left from Rhode Island, that must mean that everybody who was on a ship needed sails. Sails are made here; you’re going to need provisions. Butter, wool, you talked about coffee, you talk about the manacles.”

He brought up the Sally, a slave ship owned by the Brown family in the 18th century on which over 100 enslaved people were murdered by the captain, died of disease, starvation or suicide on just one deadly voyage. Carey pointed out that it was not only the Browns who had a stake in that voyage. Average Rhode Islanders also took out bonds on the Sally’s voyages.

Enslaved people always lived in Rhode Island, Carey said. Financiers exploited their labor to do book work. They were seen on Providence streets shopping for their captors or working at skilled labor in cooper shops building barrels. Their labor was used to build Brown.

“All of this Ivy League prestige is built, literally built by people volunteering their enslaved individuals for a piece of the pie,” Carey said.

“And if you’ve never been on the receiving end of the reverberation of that kind of pressure and all that you can’t tell somebody to get over it,” Carey said. “You can’t say ‘aren’t we actually done with that yet? We’re so far past that.’”

All that said, Carey looks to times in America’s history when people of all races have stood together, and that too needs to be recognized.

“We still need to grow and we can get together on this,” he said. “Because if I look at the Dr. Martin Luther King pictures, there are lots of black and white arm in arm in arm. He’s holding hands with a white priest. You know, he’s holding hands with the Jews are there supporting him.”

“This is part of what RIBS does is to tell the stories, to share them, and have us figure out how we can understand that it is our collective story,” Carey said. “That it’s American history. Not black history. There is no American history without black history, we need to hold that together and move forward on that level and not continue any separations.”

In 2023 RIBS and Funda Fest were selected by the Rhode Island Foundation to receive a $100,000 seeded endowment fund. The fund, which will continue to grow over the years as the organization develops, will help to ensure RIBS’ ability to continue telling a more complete history of Rhode Island, the United States, and the world well into the future.

Tutson expressed her gratefulness for the investment in RIBS’ future in true form, with a story. “There is a storyteller who teaches us a song from Malawi and the greeting is ‘I see you, I see with my eyes and my heart in front of me and I greet you with respect.’ It feels as if we’ve been seen.”

Funda Fest will be holding performances as well as film screenings until Feb. 3. For details, tickets and RSVP info, visit fundafest.org.

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The year 2015 marks a centenary after the Chilembwe uprising against imperial Britain – an activity that is believed to have influenced, in some way, Marcus Garvey. Reverend John Chilembwe was born circa 1870 in the then ‘nameless’ enclave that later became British Central Africa before mutating into Nyasaland (land of the lake), now Malawi. In 1892, initiative led him to knock on the door of the radical missionary Joseph Booth, whose famous dictum was ‘Africa for Africans’.

In 1897, Chilembwe and Booth, headed for the United States of America, via London and Liverpool. In the US, Chilembwe was encouraged by African Americans to part with the now penniless Booth. Chilembwe, with the help of the Negro Baptist Convention, attended the Virginia Theological College. The failure of the Reconstruction period and the reaction of the Baptists to the Jim Crow laws would have an impact on Chilembwe. In the US, he also met other future African leaders including John Dube, who later became president of South Africa Native Congress, later the African National Congress (ANC).

In 1900, an ordained Chilembwe was back in Malawi, with the backing of the National Baptist Convention. He was a new man and very keen to show it, drawing complaints of ‘natives living beyond their station’ from the settler community. He soon became the vocal mouthpiece of the disfranchised Africans, from women’s rights to equality based on Christian values, from the virtues of educating the African to concerns over land tenure. In 1903, when Africans were sent by the British to fight the Ya Asantewa in present Ghana, Chilembwe complained loudly.

In 1859, famed Scottish missionary David Livingstone ‘discovered’ Lake Malawi and the east African slave trade. Back home in Britain, he campaigned for the introduction of Christianity and formal commerce to counter slavery. Early attempts resulted in disaster as the first missionaries out of Oxford and Cambridge ran into trouble against some Yao chiefs, then slave agents of the Swahili traders.

Attempts were made again after the much publicised burial of Livingstone at Westminster Abbey, resulting in the establishment, in 1876, of Blantyre (now Malawi’s commercial city), a tribute to Livingstone’s birth place. Closely following on the missionaries’ heels were businessmen and speculators and, before long, the alienation of land through mainly nefarious means.

Chilembwe bought land and set up his industrial mission in Blantyre’s neighbouring district of Chiladzulo, adjacent to the vast Bruce Estates, owned by none other than Livingstone’s own daughter Anne and run by William Jervis Livingstone, a distant relation, and a man who was to embody for Chilembwe everything that was wrong with the white settlers. For Jervis, Chilembwe was the archetypical ‘native above his station’. The laborers at the Bruce Estate, mostly of Yao and Nguru stock, the latter having migrated from present Mozambique after fleeing famine and harsh Portuguese rule, looked to Chilembwe for a patron figure.

Chilembwe accused Livingstone of, among other things, burning his churches and schools. When the colonial government turned a deaf ear, Chilembwe is reported to have suggested taking matters in his own hands.

By 1913, Chilembwe was in a tight corner: funding was hard to come by, he owed money for his very impressive cathedral, his gun licence for commercial ivory hunting was revoked, the famine of 1913 pushed more Africans towards him for help, and his poor health (asthma and failing eyesight) and the death of his daughter compounded his burdens. But the proverbial straw was the start of the Great War in August 1914 which saw his audience decrease as Africans were conscripted in large numbers to fight against German East Africa (now Tanzania). In November 1914, Chilembwe penned a scathing letter admonishing the government:

On Saturday 23 January 1915 he started an uprising. Chilembwe plotted to kill all white men in the protectorate, save for a few missionaries sympathetic to his cause, to bring about a new order in the region. The first casualty was Jervis Livingstone, his severed head a prized trophy by Chilembwe’s men. Others were sent to Blantyre–in the true fashion of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry–to break into the armoury and steal guns and ammunition. This mission was a failure of sorts with the supposed leader, John Gray Kufa, deserting and an accidental alarm being raised by Chilembwe’s men. Legend has it that Chilembwe preached the next day’s church service with the head of Livingstone next to the pulpit where he is reputed to have said the words: ‘Let us strike a blow and die for Africa’.

A few skirmishes with government and volunteer forces ensued but, by Tuesday 26 January, his whole mission had been abandoned. His impressive cathedral was then demolished with explosives. The uprising was quelled by 3 February 1915 when its leader was shot while trying to cross into Mozambique.

Source: 101 power malawi

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BOTTOM LINE

– The US Embassy in Harare has identified the potential for Zimbabwe to become a growth hub for Southern Africa.

– This is a curious conclusion to draw given the fact that Zimbabwe currently ranks near the bottom of the DHL Global Connectedness Index.

– The State Department’s Integrated Country Strategy for Zimbabwe neither conceptualizes what it means to be a growth hub for Southern Africa nor explains whether it would be in the US national security and foreign policy interests for Zimbabwe to become one.

– It is unclear what conditions and interventions would be required to transform Zimbabwe into a growth hub.

– The US Embassy Harare should pursue the transformation of Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa as a mission security interest.

– Congress should play an active role in the planning process to ensure congressional support and resources to achieve this objective.

The Integrated Country Strategy for Zimbabwe (ICS Zimbabwe) declares that “Zimbabwe’s strategic importance to the United States is as a potential growth hub for southern Africa.” This is a remarkable conclusion to draw for a country that currently ranks near the very bottom of the DHL Global Connectedness Index – a major index that measures globalization based on international trade, capital, information, and people flows.

This not only begs the question of under what conditions would Zimbabwe emerge as a growth hub for Southern Africa, but also whether it would be in the national interest of the US government to help Zimbabwe achieve that outcome. The ICS Zimbabwe fails to shed light on those questions. The embassy should be encouraged to answer them. Below is a list of some possible starting points for bringing about that state of affairs.

Recommendation #1: The ICS Zimbabwe should be amended to further develop the concept of Zimbabwe as a growth hub for Southern Africa.

In the Chief of Mission Priorities, the ICS Zimbabwe refers to Zimbabwe as a “potential growth hub for southern Africa,” and this is described as strategically important to the US government.

Nowhere in the ICS is it shown that Zimbabwe has the potential to become a growth hub or why this outcome would be strategically important to Washington.

Moreover, this is a perplexing observation given that Zimbabwe is a landlocked country currently ranked 160 out of 171 countries on DHL’s Global Connectedness Index 2022. This places it below all its neighbors, as well as impoverished Sub-Saharan African countries such as Sierra Leone and Gabon.

There is a clear and present need to define these terms and their relationships more fully. Fortunately, other actors have done so:

– Network theorists have defined a hub as a highly connected node in a group of interconnected nodes.

– The World Bank defines economic growth as the increase in the value of goods and services produced by an economy over time.

– The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is composed of Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, United Republic Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This collective of countries is commonly understood to be Southern Africa.

The US Embassy Harare should borrow from these concepts. This would provide a way to conceptualize the “growth hub for southern Africa” as an SADC member state that is highly interconnected with other SADC member states through linkages that drive positive change in volume of output or in the real expenditure or income of their populations.

Recommendation #2: The ICS Zimbabwe should contain a detailed explanation of the conditions under which it would be (and would not be) in US national security and foreign policy interests for Zimbabwe to become a growth hub for Southern Africa.

The government of Zimbabwe has strong relationships with major-power competitors of the United States and other authoritarian revisionist states who have expressed a manifest desire to change the world order.

The ICS Zimbabwe acknowledges that China has “expanded its influence” in Zimbabwe, and this is providing Beijing with “near-unfettered access to Zimbabwean natural resources,” including base minerals that are critical to the global clean-energy transition.

At the same time, the ICS declares that the Zimbabwean economy is currently functioning “for the benefit of a privileged few, including the president, his family, senior military officials, and a small group of elite ruling party and private sector actors.”

In this context, there is a need to make clear the conditions under which the transformation of Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa would contribute “to local job creation, greater transparency, local economic development, citizen empowerment, gender equality, climate-smart solutions, and improved labor and environmental standards,” among other things.

In parallel, there is a need to identify the conditions under which the transformation of Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa would support the administration’s policy of focusing on the transnational aspects of corruption.

One cannot assume that the transformation of the country into a regional growth hub would be of much benefit to ordinary Zimbabweans. It could very well fuel the spread of corruption and widen the already massive inequities that exist across the country.

Recommendation #3: US Embassy Harare should seek to partner with the government of Zimbabwe to develop a stand-alone roadmap for Zimbabwe to become a growth hub for Southern Africa.

In coordination with appropriate US government departments and agencies, the US Embassy Harare should develop a roadmap for American and Zimbabwean policymakers that depicts a strategic pathway for transforming Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa, in a way that simultaneously advances US national security and foreign policy interests and SADC economic prosperity and opportunity.

This roadmap should clearly describe the resources, activities, outputs, short-term objectives, and long-term goals that would advance a “shared vision of a better, more sustainable, healthier, and more prosperous future” through transforming Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa.

These activities should include specific risk management approaches that will be used to try to achieve the conditions necessary for the transformation of Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa to be aligned with US national security and foreign policy interests over the coming decades.

Recommendation #4: The State Department should involve Congress early in the planning process to ensure congressional support and resources to pursue the transformation of Zimbabwe into a growth hub for Southern Africa as a US national security interest.

The transformation of Zimbabwe into a regional growth hub would be a resource-intensive, long-term goal that would require political and budgetary support over a span of time that likely exceeds the life-span of a single ICS.

The State Department would need to involve relevant committees of Congress in the early stages of the planning process to garner the support needed for a robust pursuit of this policy goal.

Congress would likely be receptive to innovative approaches for partnering with a country known to have large deposits of rare earth metals that are used in the manufacture of electronics, batteries, and magnets. Members do not want these important resources to fall under the control and direction of major-power competitors.

However, Congress would likely be sensitive to the costs and risks of pursuing such a long-term goal with a government that has long been hostile to US interests.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Michael Walsh – African Studies Program

Michael Walsh is a Senior Fellow in the Africa Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a senior subject matter expert who regularly advises companies, governments, nonprofits, and think tanks on democracy, development, humanitarian, and security affairs. Mr. Walsh is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for African Studies at Howard University. He is a Visiting Researcher in the African Studies Program at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. He is a Guest Lecturer on African affairs at the Foreign Service Institute. Mr. Walsh was the Course Director for the Humanitarian Security Risk Management Course for United Nations Development Program staff. He served on the Security Advisory Group for the Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Response at Team Rubicon. Mr. Walsh is a regular commentator on Africa and Near Eastern affairs. Recent radio, television, and print outlets include British Broadcasting Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, European Consortium for Political Research, and Voice of America.

Ambassador Charles A. Ray, a member of the Board of Trustees and Chair of the Africa Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, served as US Ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Republic of Zimbabwe. In addition, he was the first U.S. Consul General to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, opening the Consulate General there in 1998.

From 2006 to 2009, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs, responsible for DoD efforts to account for those missing in combat from World War II to the then current conflicts and for policy related to the rescue of personnel who become isolated, missing, or taken in service abroad.

During his diplomatic career, Mr. Ray served as deputy chief of mission in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and at consular posts in Guangzhou and Shenyang, China, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. He was diplomat-in-residence at the University of Houston during the 2005-2006 academic year; responsible for outreach and recruiting at colleges and universities in South Texas.

Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1982, he served 20 years in the United States Army, with postings in Europe and Asia, including two tours in Vietnam during the war. He retired in 2012 from the Foreign Service and is now engaged in consulting, public speaking, and writing. He is the author of more than 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, including a historical series about the Buffalo Soldiers, the African-American soldiers who served on the western frontier, and is the author of an Amazon best-selling mountain man adventure series. His nonfiction works include books and articles on management, leadership, international relations, and history. He is the author of over 250 works of fiction and nonfiction.

Ray is currently a member of the board of directors of the American Academy of Diplomacy, communications director for the Association of Black American Ambassadors, a member of the American College of National Security Leaders, a member of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, and a member of the board of directors of the Cold War Museum.

In addition to his government service, Mr.Ray has worked as a newspaper/magazine journalist, photographer, and artist, and was editorial cartoonist for the Spring Lake (NC) News, a weekly newspaper in central North Carolina during most of the mid to late-1970s.

He has a B.S. in business administration from Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas; an M.S. in systems management from the University of Southern California; and an M.S. in national security strategy from the National Defense University. In 2001, he received the Thomas Jefferson Award from American Citizens Abroad (ACA) for his work in support of American business in southern Vietnam.

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*BY STEVIE M KAUKA

When we talk of martyrs the first thing that comes to mind is the Christians who died for their belief in Jesus Christ, and closer to AFRICA the martyrs of Uganda., to which most catholic and Anglican churches and establishments derives their names to signify the importance of their actions, St Kizzito, Charles Lwangwa , St Luke, St Denis among others.

 In Malawi we have people of different divides , religions, and political affiliations but they almost agree that John Chilembwe is a martyr ,

A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, refusing to advocate an ideology …. of which they do not believe in. One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle. A great show of suffering in order to arouse sympathy from the wider public.

However, the focus here is about John Chilembwe. A lot of literature has been written about John Chilembwe and I will not belabor you with that, but I would like to focus on him as a conscious martyr.

Conscious is a Latin word whose original meaning was “knowing” or “aware.” So, a conscious person has an awareness of her environment and her own existence and thoughts. If you are “self-conscious,” you are overly aware and even embarrassed by how you think, you look or act.

 To follow the analogy of Chilembwe being a conscious martyr let us understand that while in Nyasaland then John Chilembwe was just an ordinary person, but when he travelled to the United States, he met people who were critical of whites. When he left home Nyasaland was under British protectorate.

He had traveled to the United States in 1897 to fundraise for the Mission to which he belonged to back home. There in America, Chilembwe was plunged into an environment that was overly critical of whites. He met and was influenced by the radical Zulu missionary John L. Dube from South Africa, Dr. Lewis Garnett Jordan of the Negro National Baptist Convention and many other African American preachers and radicals. Staying behind in the United States as Booth returned to Nyasaland, Booth was the one who arranged that John Chilembwe should go to America having been impressed with his character as his servant then, Chilembwe attended Virginia Theological Seminary and College at Lynchburg, Virginia in 1898 and 1899. In the United States, Chilembwe gained an increasingly global perspective on the struggle of people of African descent against injustice and white supremacy. He took these newly acquired political ideas back to Nyasaland in 1900, returning as an ordained Baptist minister.

Once returned, Chilembwe founded the Providence Industrial Mission with aid from the American National Baptist Convention. By 1912, he had established a chain of independent African schools, constructed a brick church, and planted crops of cotton, tea, and coffee. His attempts to uplift the local population, however, were undercut by continuing exploitation of Africans by the British. Triggered by British mistreatment of famine refugees from Mozambique as well as the conscription of natives to fight the Germans in Tanzania during World War I, Chilembwe invoked the name of the American abolitionist John Brown and organized a rebellion against the British. The Chilembwe uprising is a story for another day.

While in America he started to have goals, he was powered with faith in the outcome of his native Nyasaland, coupled with   the exposure he was having he started noticing the opportunities to fulfill that dream, but for the time being it was beyond the reach of the conscious mind

Back home he wrote letters seeking justice and equality for the Black people about the thangata system.

The subconscious mind is the powerful secondary system that runs everything in your life. Learning how to stimulate communication between the conscious and the subconscious minds is a powerful tool on the way to success, happiness, and riches.

The subconscious mind is a databank for everything, which is not in your conscious mind. It stores your beliefs, your previous experience, your memories, your skills. Everything that you have seen, done or thought is also there.

It is the issues that he had learnt observed and read while in America that were in his subconscious mind that something was wrong and needed action to correct the wrongs. He was conscious of his surroundings in Nyasaland before and after America that he saw poverty, oppression and to this end he encouraged hard work, dressing smartly, he discouraged drinking and encouraged people to get an education perhaps because of what he had seen in America and wanted a just society for the people of Nyasaland.

Martin Luther King the Black civil rights campaigner in one of his speeches had this to say and I quote …” Well, I do not know what will happen now. We have some difficult days ahead. But it really does not matter to me now, because I have been to the mountaintop. And I do not mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I am not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I have looked it over. And I have seen the Promised Land. I may not go there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!’ end of quote.

I can envisage that John Chilembwe in his conscious mind on the path he had taken was aware of what lied ahead but he did not mind as it was in his conscious that something was wrong and had to be corrected he knew that of the issues that lied ahead he was aware of the implications but in his conscious he still had to do it. Nature has given humans absolute control over the information that enters the subconscious mind, through the five senses. However, this does not mean that everyone exercises this control. Even more, in the majority of cases the average person does not exercise this control. This is why so many people go through life in poverty, denial and waiting for others to rescue them. I

it is this premise that after his demise John Chilembwe should be considered as a conscious martyr as his surrounding and actions are stated.

With the passing of time things do change and facts become twisted to suit a particular sect of society for their selfish ends, but the fact still remains that events happened that qualifies the so-called victims to be martyrs and John Chilembwe qualifies as a conscious martyr.

It is worth remembering that there is a price to be paid in order to be able to influence your subconscious mind. That price is called persistence. You have to keep taking the steps for autosuggestion, you have to keep repeating your goals aloud and you have to keep having faith in the outcome and the end-result. John Chilembwe to this end led an uprising to the unjust of the white rule he died while fighting for a worthy cause for a Black man.

The difference between those who succeed and those who fail may just be a few days. Or it could be the availability of a back-up plan. Those who always say: “In case I do not succeed, I will do this and that” will always do this and that. Because their conscious mind would always keep thinking about the way out.

While Martyrs Day and Kamuzu Day have been there since independence, it was after 1994 when the then president, Bakili Muluzi declared 15th January as Chilembwe Day holiday. In 1944, during the formative period of the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), George Mwase from Nkhata Bay and other members of the executive committee then, pressed the colonial Nyasaland Government to set 15th January as Chilembwe Day. To no avail.

The author is a fellow  of IPMM who writes on assorted topics in his own personal capacity.

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Conservative bishops around the world are pushing back against the Vatican’s recent comments on blessing same-sex couples, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Vatican announced Monday that same-sex couples can receive a blessing from the Church so long as it doesn’t confuse with the Sacrament of Marriage, which the Vatican said is still only for between a man and a woman. Many international church leaders, however, have expressed concern and even outright dismissal of the decision, arguing that it creates “pastoral confusion” and could lead to blessing same-sex relationships, according to WSJ. (RELATED: Catholic Church Authorities In The Holy Land Accuse IDF Of Killing Two Women, Targeting Convent)

Church bishops in Zambia, Malawi and the principal archdiocese of Kazakhstan have opted to ban their priests from giving these kinds of blessings, according to WSJ.

The Zambia bishops said they would not comply with the Vatican’s directive “in order to avoid any pastoral confusion and ambiguity as well as not to break the law of our country which forbids same-sex unions and activities, and while listening to our cultural heritage which does not accept same-sex relationships,” according to a statement released on Facebook.

Ukrainian bishops warned that the Vatican’s directive was too ambiguous and could lead to an endorsement of same-sex relationships, according to the WSJ. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said Monday that the Vatican’s decision was nothing new and that it did not alter the church’s teaching on the subject of marriage, according to a press release.

In Pope Francis’ message Thursday, he warned against “rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward,” according to the Vatican. Francis has been criticized for his comments on this issue in the past, even appearing to call for civil union law for same-sex couples in a 2020 documentary.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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