news bits...

Stories I’m following in Africa at the moment:

Protests and violence continuing in Egypt. Duh. Aren't you?

Preparations (or adequate lack thereof) are underway for upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Reports have surfaced on the internet of coordinated preparation for potential joint military action in eastern Congo by the militaries of Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC.

The Economist has a piece on sexual violence in warfare, with some attention paid to the DRC.

Four prominent Rwandans in exile (variously in South Africa, Europe, and reportedly the DRC) who recently formed an opposition political group (with ties to armed militias?) have been convicted in absentia of serious offenses against the Rwandan state (*yawn*).

Low level violence in central Nigeria continues, as it has for some time, in and around Jos.

The Southern Sudanese referendum is over and all reports indicate independence, although official results have not been released (coverage provided by an incredibly talented former colleague who went freelance in Juba, Southern Sudan's ostensible new capital).

An arrest has been made in the murder investigation of David Kato, a prominent and outspoken LGBT rights activist in Uganda who was publicly outed by an incredibly intolerant and unscrupulous magazine last year. He was recently brutally beaten to death with (according to reports) a claw hammer in his home. Any sort of causal inference is of course impossible from my position, but Kato's murder, the incredibly vulnerable position of LGBT persons in Uganda, and this kind of intolerance cloaked in the righteousness of religious pseudo-therapy peddled to a population characterized by both widespread religiosity and virulent (and violent) anti-homosexuality is troubling. Until people can truly be accepted as who they are, gay or otherwise, no exceptions, statements like this reek of nervous hand-washing, even if they were written with sincerity. Corrective ‘rehabilitation’ assumes a basic premise that ignores scientific evidence and clinical advice from major medical organizations. More importantly, it helps perpetuates negative stereotypes about individuals which underpin abusive, intolerant, and illegal laws (Uganda, after all, is a party to several international and regional agreements prohibiting the very specimen of absurd law proposed in 2009 in Uganda's parliament). Kato may have been killed in a random robbery; it's entirely possible, Kampala can be a rough place. However, he was still had a huge target on his back.

And lastly, Rwandan authorities are taking population control seriously in this, Africa's most densely populated country.