African Nobel Prize laureates and heads of state gathered on Wednesday in the Senegalese capital for an African Union-sponsored conference on peace and the continent’s renaissance.
Former president Frederick de Klerk, who earned the peace prize in 1993 with icon Nelson Mandela for their efforts to end apartheid in South Africa, and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986 were on hand for a gala evening in their honour.
So too were Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade. Presidents from South Africa, Mali, Uganda and Cape Verde were also expected to attend the conference.
Mandela, who announced earlier this year that he would scale back his public appearances, and Ghanaian-born United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, peace prize laureate in 2001, were invited but did not attend the glittering festivities at Dakar’s Hotel Meridien President.
South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, the peace price winner in 1984, also declined the invitation for health reasons, African Union chief Alpha Oumar Konare told reporters earlier on Wednesday.
”Despite their absence, the meaning of this conference is clear — it is a clarion call for peace in Africa,” Konare said.
The event is to serve as a launchpad for 2005’s Decade for Peace in Africa, a bid to resolve the long-running conflicts that have kept the continent at an economic and social disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
Under the theme ”Africa in the 21st century: integration and renaissance,” the heads of state would attend round-table discussions about integration and renaissance on the world’s poorest continent.
Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gadaffi was also to participate by video conference, a spokesperson said.
About 700 representatives of civil society, universities and governments will also discuss the role of pan-Africanism in the 21st century and the contributions made by African intellectuals to resolving the crisis of African identity in a multicultural context.
The three-day conference will also include cultural events in Dakar and on Goree island, from where Africans were sent in chains to lives of slavery for three centuries.
Between 1502 and 1888, when slavery was finally abolished in Brazil, between 10-million and 12-million slaves arrived in the Americas, sold as property and having children born into bondage.
Since the early 1960s, millions of Africans have freely emigrated to the Americas, Asia and Europe, in waves that accompanied the hard-won independence of their home countries from their colonial powers.
Between 70-million and 100-million Africans and people of African descent are estimated to live in the Americas. – Sapa-AFP