Our Madame Vice President Kamala Harris is currently receiving a joyous welcome in Ghana, and getting excellent reviews and responses in the African press. For a change, it’s also been good to see more positive coverage from U.S. media, though from my perspective it is still woefully insufficient. She will be spending three three days in Ghana, two in Tanzania, and one in Zambia, returning to Washington, DC on April 2.
Her arrival:
Here is the video shown on TV3 Ghana, of her remarks at Jubilee House:
White House transcript of Meeting with President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana
Vice President Kamala Harris met with President Nana Akufo-Addo today in Accra, Ghana. The Vice President affirmed the strength of our bilateral relationship, noting the deep historical, cultural, and economic ties between the United States and Ghana. Building on discussions during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022, the two leaders consulted on a number of global and regional issues. The Vice President thanked President Akufo-Addo for Ghana’s strong partnership at the United Nations Security Council, including its firm defense of the UN Charter, amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The Vice President applauded President Akufo-Addo for his steadfast leadership to defend and advance democracy in West Africa and to hold anti-democratic governments accountable. She reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to support human rights and women’s empowerment. The two leaders discussed insecurity in the neighboring Sahel, including the threat extremist groups pose to Coastal West Africa. Vice President Harris announced that the United States would provide more than $100 million to support stabilization in Ghana, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Togo, including at least $86 million over the next three years in support of the 10-year plan for implementing the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability, which President Biden released on March 24. The Vice President underscored Ghana’s role as a security leader in the region and our strong defense relationship, including Ghana’s co-hosting of Exercise Flintlock earlier this month with Côte d’Ivoire.
Vice President Harris also welcomed Ghana’s commitment to reforming its economy to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth. She affirmed the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to international coordination on debt relief and to continue to push for all official bilateral creditors to provide a meaningful debt reduction for countries that need it, including Ghana. The two leaders discussed the strength of our people-to-people ties, and Vice President Harris applauded President Akufo-Addo’s leadership to elevate engagement with the African Diaspora.
Were it not for social media, doubtful we would see the response to her remarks delivered at Black Star Square.
In 1957, the Ghanaian politician and revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah led the Gold Coast, now Ghana, to its independence from Britain. Nkrumah became the first prime minister and president of Ghana, and to celebrate his nation’s newfound autonomy, he commissioned the construction of a huge public square. Black Star Square, also known as Independence Square, is located in Accra, Ghana and is now the site for all the major military and civic parades in the Ghanaian capital. It was completed in 1961 to coincide with the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II. From the first parades in honor of the Queen’s visit all the way up to the present day, Black Star Square has hosted all of the country’s major national public gatherings, national festivals, military parades, and concerts. The most important parade held in the square each year on March 6 is the Independence Day parades.
Her full speech:
Harris in Africa looks to painful past, innovative future
ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday stood before a monument commemorating Ghana’s independence from colonialism and envisioned a grand future between the U.S. and Africa, propelled by innovation on the continent. But she’s also insisting on exploring past wounds, heading to a seaside fort where enslaved Africans were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas.
“We have an intertwined history, some of which is painful and some of which is prideful,” she told a crowd of gathered at the Black Stone Gate, the monument bearing the words: “Freedom and Justice” and 1957, the year the country became independent. “And all of which we must acknowledge, teach and never forget.”
[...]
As the nation’s first Black and South Asian vice president, Harris is a powerful symbol in Ghana, and thousands waited hours at the Independence Square for a chance to see her. After the speech, Harris was to tour the Cape Coast Castle and speak there, too. “Because of this history, this continent of course has a special significance for me personally, as the first Black vice president of the United States,” she said to huge cheers from the crowd. “And this is a history, like many of us, that I learned as a young child.”
Tracy Sika Brobbey said “it’s a special moment” to see the first woman vice president. Margaret Mintah, who waited alongside her, said Harris “gives us some kind of hope, that we can believe that anything is possible.”
In her speech she referenced having visited Zambia as a child, on a visit to her grandfather P.V. Gopalan. The Indian government had sent him there to help Zambia manage refugees from Zimbabwe, which had just declared independence from Britain.
On another note — I grinned when I saw the Twitter response to her teaming up with Idris Elba, actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, Spike Lee and National Urban League President and former Mayor of New Orleans Mark Morial
I’m sorry I haven’t seen coverage of her trip here on Daily Kos. Hopefully that will change. I plan to dedicate my upcoming Black Music Sunday to exploring her Africa travel playlist. Hope you’ll join me.
I had to come back into the diary today to update with MVP’s visit to Cape Coast Castle:
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Vice President Kamala Harris has officially arrived on the continent of Africa. America’s first woman, Black and south Asian president, is currently in Accra, Ghana, and later this week, will visit Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Lusaka, Zambia.
As a history-maker already, Harris marks further history as the first sitting female, Black and south Asian U.S. vice president to visit the continent.
Harris is fulfilling President Joe Biden’s pledge for him and members of his cabinet to travel to the continent this year after hosting African leaders in December of 2022 for a U.S.-Africa summit, where the administration committed billions of dollars of investments in the region.
During a recent White House press briefing, John Kirby, National Security Council spokesperson, the Biden-Harris administration’s several trips to Africa this year is about relationship building as “we work on this relationship one at a time because every country on the continent is different.”
The African countries planned for the vice president’s visit, and the United States, are working to strengthen issues of national security and economic security through the expansion of access to the digital economy, support of climate adaptation and resilience, and strengthening business ties and investment, including through innovation, entrepreneurship, and the economic empowerment of women.
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Ever since she became vice president, critiques — both fair and unfair — have plagued Kamala Harris.
There have been questions about how she’s represented the administration as a spokesperson, concerns about staff turnover, and most recently, worries about whether she’s been effective as a VP, and what that could mean for her future as a leader of the party.
The latest wave of criticism featured a number of unnamed Democrats disparaging her and worrying that she wouldn’t be able to win an election at the top of the ticket. As a particularly stinging line in a February New York Times piece put it: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
Such intense scrutiny has been driven, in part, by a heightened focus on Harris as President Joe Biden’s successor. Given the president’s age, and the possibility that Harris may actually have to step into the presidency, there’s been a much bigger spotlight on her record than there otherwise might be. Harris’s identity — she’s the first woman, first Black person and first South Asian person to hold the VP’s office — has also contributed to an unprecedented level of attention relative to her predecessors, historians told Vox.
To better understand Harris’s performance as vice president, and what to make of these critiques, Vox spoke to more than two dozen sources, including White House officials, top Democratic strategists, activists, and academic experts. The White House did not respond to a request for comment and the vice president’s office pointed to a public statement from press secretary Kirsten Allen, who highlighted what Harris has done so far in a Twitter thread.
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It must be election season.
That’s the time when Black Americans - often joined by some other unfortunate group (Hispanics, immigrants, gay people, trans people) - are made into the boogeyman, threatening white Americans with unimaginable horrors like diversity, inclusion, equity or, worse, AP African American studies.
Beating up on Black people to rile up white voters is a tried and true practice in American politics because it...works.
White voters make up the lion’s share of voters in this country, and that’s especially so in the Republican Party. The foundational elements of the modern Republican Party are opposition to desegregation and civil rights.
Yes, the Republican Party started as one that grudgingly and then robustly advanced slavery’s abolition. But, by the 1940s, its power had shriveled.
In 1949, Republicans held only 171 of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Soon, though, Republicans would ride a wave of rage to political dominance.
Southern white voters from the South, furious that Democrats were making them go to school, eat and work jobs with Black people, bolted the party and - presto! - the modern Republican Party was born.
While white Republicans were the primary beneficiaries of this transformation, other politicians also took note of the power that could be gained in tarring Black people.
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Arizona is the latest state to ban hair discrimination, to protect something that should not in the 21st century, have to be protected — our own natural identity. The Grio: knowing and loving ourselves
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Know thyself. These words were written on the monuments and walls of our African ancestors for a reason. Long ago, these ancient luminaries knew well the inherent and transformative value of a knowledge of self, the indelible significance of knowing your own culture, where you come from and who you are. Without such knowledge, it would be very hard to know where you are going.
That acknowledged, how can a group of people who were kidnapped from their native land, brutally enslaved in an unfamiliar place and regarded by law as inhuman begin to know themselves? Especially when cultural aspects as natural as our own hair have been targeted to further discriminate against us and prevent us from embracing our own culture?
Last week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order to end race-based hair discrimination, stating, “For far too long Black women, men, and children have been deprived of educational and employment opportunities for wearing their natural hair… Today, I am issuing an Executive Order that demonstrates the need to prioritize the protection of culture, and allows individuals to show up as their true selves without being subjected to race-based hair discrimination.”
Hobbs’ law is based on the CROWN Act — which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair” — a legal framework that prohibits race-based hair discrimination, a far-too-common practice of denying jobs and school opportunities based on natural hair texture or cultural expression. The 2023 CROWN Workplace Research Study found that approximately two-thirds of Black women change their hair for a job interview due to past or potential discrimination. Since the act’s 2019 introduction by the Crown Coalition in California, similar laws have been adopted in 20 states and by the U.S. House of Representatives.
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From Zimbabwe, where many must work at night because it’s the only time there is power, to Nigeria where collapses of the grid are frequent, the reliable supply of electricity remains elusive across Africa.
The electricity shortages that plague many of Africa’s 54 countries are a serious drain on the continent’s economic growth, energy experts warn.
In recent years South Africa’s power generation has become so inadequate that the continent’s most developed economy must cope with rolling power blackouts of eight to 10 hours per day.
Africa’s sprawling cities have erratic supplies of electricity but large swaths of the continent’s rural areas have no power at all. In 2021, 43% of Africans — about 600 million people — lacked access to electricity with 590 million of them in sub‐Saharan Africa, according to the International Energy Agency.
Investments of nearly $20 billion are required annually to achieve universal electrification across sub-Saharan Africa, according to World Bank estimates. Of that figure nearly $10 billion is needed annually bring power and keep it on in West and Central Africa.
There are many reasons for Africa’s dire delivery of electricity including ageing infrastructure, lack of government oversight and a shortage of skills to maintain the national grids, according to Andrew Lawrence, an energy expert at the Witwatersrand University Business School in Johannesburg.
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Gang violence has killed more than 530 Haitians this year and 187 in the past two weeks alone, as the security and political situation in the Caribbean nation continues to devolve. Decades of corrupt leadership and weakened democratic institutions — supported by the United States — have brought a state of terror and lawlessness to Haiti without an achievable political solution or even an end to the violence in sight.
The violence, concentrated in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas, is caused by political and economic factors including the decimation of the country’s largest economic driver, agriculture, and subsequent urban migration, small arms proliferation, and a political class willing to weaponize Haiti’s struggles to cling to power. The person nominally in charge of the country, acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, lacks a true mandate to power and has proven incapable of managing the chaos, instead proposing to deploy the country’s young and fragile military to maintain order.
Haiti has faced serious and compounding crises, including a devastating 2010 earthquake, floods, cholera outbreaks, hurricanes, and corrupt, dictatorial, and incompetent leaders. But the current crisis affects everyday life to a perilous degree; ordinary Haitians are afraid to leave their homes even to access food and water. A fluid network of violent gangs controls nearly every aspect of life for thousands of people, government officials are either beholden to the gangs or attempting to use them for their own self-interest, and the international community has proven unwilling or unable to help Haitians — both those who leave and those who stay — find peace and safety.
The thread running through many of these crises is external, originating from international interference in Haiti’s affairs dating back to its independence in 1804. As is the case in many nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the US has repeatedly tried to sway or command Haitian politics to its own liking, with devastating results for Haitians themselves and the country overall. The actions of the broader international community, too, have often been cruel, incompetent, or both, starting with French insistence on reparations from Haiti post-independence.
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Under the blazing Colombian sun, Germán Balera pushes a small cart loaded with a few thermoses of coffee and packs of cigarettes across a derelict airport runway and into a labyrinth of ramshackle huts of corrugated zinc, plastic sheets and cardboard.
Balera is a resident of La Pista, Colombia’s largest informal settlement that is home to approximately 14,000 people on the outskirts of the city of Maicao in north-east Colombia. They are crammed into 12 makeshift blocks spread along the 1.2km runway of the dusty city’s abandoned airport, in the arid Colombian province of La Guajira.
The shantytown is one of 52 informal settlements in Maicao, a stone’s throw from the Venezuelan border. It houses about 4,000 families – almost doubling in size in the past two years. Life is dire in La Pista, where key essentials such as food, water, sanitation, adequate housing and education are in short supply.
“Some days we eat, some days we don’t,” says Balera, sitting outside his small, plastic-clad hut as his nephews play around him. “There is no work here, you can’t do anything. Life is hard here.”
Balera’s livelihood and that of his four grandchildren depends on his meagre cart. On a good day he may return home with up to 20,000 pesos (about £3.50 or $4.25); on others he arrives empty-handed. Other residents live off rubbish collection and recycling, which produce an equally miserly income.
Most residents in La Pista live off one meal a day. Large families, sometimes up to 12 people, live cramped in the tiny, decrepit shacks, at the mercy of the relentless heat and the frequent heavy rains that flood much of the settlement.
According to the World Food Programme’s latest report on food insecurity in Colombia, 50% of La Guajira’s population is food insecure, with the province also bearing the highest rate of monetary poverty in the country – registering 67.4%.
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MPs in Uganda have passed a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which would make homosexual acts punishable by death, attracting strong condemnation from rights campaigners.
All but two of the 389 legislators voted late on Tuesday for the hardline anti-homosexuality bill, which introduces capital and life imprisonment sentences for gay sex and “recruitment, promotion and funding” of same-sex “activities”.
“A person who commits the offence of aggravated homosexuality and is liable, on conviction to suffer death,” reads the bill presented by Robina Rwakoojo, the chairperson for legal and parliamentary affairs.
Just two MPs from the ruling party, Fox Odoi-Oywelowo and Paul Kwizera Bucyana, opposed the new legislation.
“The bill is ill-conceived, it contains provisions that are unconstitutional, reverses the gains registered in the fight against gender-based violence and criminalises individuals instead of conduct that contravenes all known legal norms,” said Odoi-Oywelowo.
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When Renaldo Webb launched his dog food company PetPlate seven years ago, the odds were stacked against him as a Black man entering a market with little to no Black representation. Armed with knowledge, tenacity, and a genuinely good product, he’s managed to beat those odds.
With its simple mission to offer better food for dogs so they can live longer, healthier, happier lives, PetPlate has grown into a full-fledged dog food company that has delivered over 15 million meals and treats to dogs across the country. Webb sat down with theGrio recently to discuss PetPlate’s growing success, how he got started, and how his love of dogs propels him.
Webb was led to start PetPlate the way many inventors and creators are similarly inspired: he wanted to solve a personal need. An MIT grad with a degree in physics, Webb found himself in pet food factories for work, where he saw how a lot of standard dog food is made. Around the same time, Webb had also adopted his first dog, Winston, who had a very sensitive stomach.
“I couldn’t find anything in the market that would work for him,” Webb said, adding, “One day, I just had the epiphany that maybe the ingredients you see [while in the pet food factories] are the cause and he needs something a little bit fresher.”
Webb said this epiphany sent him on a trajectory of doing “crazy research” on freshly cooked human-grade pet food. Soon after, Webb devised the foundation for PetPlate’s recipe and launched the brand, serving as not only its founder but also as chef and delivery man for the business. He recalls early on having to ride around New York City, where he was based, on a bicycle to make deliveries and get the product into the bowls of the city’s dogs.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
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