Beating the air with her homemade net, Aicha Ali chases a swirling black and turquoise butterfly. Far from indulging in a frivolous pastime, this Kenyan mother is earning crucial family income. "I like capturing butterflies; it’s fun because I make some money," she says, puffing as she wipes the sweat pearling on her nose after a frantic chase in the forest’s sandy trails.
Gaudencia, a Kenyan woman in her fifties, works barefoot preparing her fallow field for sowing corn. Until two years ago, she had no idea leaving the land untilled some seasons could reap a better harvest. ”It was not enough to feed the whole family before. But now it is,” she says, wiping beads of sweat off her forehead.
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/ 21 February 2007
A day after the United Nations endorsed an African Union peacekeeping force for Somalia, and almost two months after the ouster of the Islamists from Mogadishu, analysts on Wednesday warned of spiralling chaos. At least 12 died and thousands fled the coastal capital, Mogadishu, this week after fierce fighting.
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/ 26 November 2006
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Supreme Court will announce its ruling in failed presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba’s challenge to the election results on Monday, presiding Judge Kalonda Kele said. The court has been examining Bemba’s legal challenge to the presidential elections since November 20.
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/ 29 October 2006
Bwinja Bwinja points his digital camera at a ripped election poster of presidential hopeful Jean-Pierre Bemba and snaps away. The 12-year-old boy’s camera has given him a special role in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s historic election.
It is fast-growing, drought-resistant and sprawls over hectares of land in Kenya’s arid regions, providing fuel and furniture material for thousands of impoverished herders and farmers. But once hailed as a miracle cure for land degradation and desertification, the rapidly spreading prosopis tree has become an environmental menace that many wish had never been introduced to the East African nation.
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/ 10 February 2006
His rebel group is one of world’s most notorious, reviled for an incongruous mix of religion and brutality, but Joseph Kony, the chief of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, is a mystery to most. For nearly 20 years, the elusive guerrilla supremo’s fighters have terrorised vast swathes of northern Uganda with an unholy blend of murder and wanton destruction.
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/ 8 February 2006
One-by-one the words, bizarre and horrific, spout from the mouth of Alice as she recounts the terror and abuse she suffered as a child slave for Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army. ”They cut off three [people’s] heads and I was forced to use them as stones to hold the saucepan,” the 17-year-old said, describing her punishment for trying to run away.
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/ 9 November 2005
After three bitterly contested polls in the politically volatile Tanzania’s offshore state of Zanzibar, religious and political leaders fear that the island’s Muslim population may turn to radicalism to vent their frustration. The thrice-beaten opposition Civic United Front party has intensified claims that the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi or Revolutionary party fraudulently won the last three elections.
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/ 1 November 2005
Zanzibar opposition leader Seif Sharif Hamad on Tuesday claimed victory in the hotly contested race for the presidency of the semi-autonomous Tanzanian archipelago amid new clashes over weekend elections. ”Now, I know I am the winner,” Seif Sharif Hamad of the Civic United Front told reporters.