The Secretariat of the Global Pan African Movement condemns, deplores, and abhors the continued wanton loss of life, destruction and despoliation in the Darfur province of Sudan. The Global Pan African Movement welcomes the measures announced by the African Union towards a speedy control, reversal and resolution of this tragic situation. The Global Pan African Movement calls on the Government of Sudan to urgently do all in its power to control, restrain and disarm marauding millitias in Darfur. The Sudanese people urgently need and deserve a just, democratic, prosperous, and lasting peace.

"On 2 - 4 July 2004, more than 530 delegates - including more than 80 health workers and representing over 60 organisations and institutions - met at the first People's Health Summit (PHS) to discuss the crisis and inequity in the health system and the roll-out of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. While recognising the impact of the legacy of injustice and inequality of apartheid on the health service of our country and our people, delegates to the PHS expressed grave concern that in spite of many good policies, laws and programmes, the public health service is in crisis and the quality of many services is in decline."

Peace in Angola has paved the way for advances in freedom of expression, association and assembly, but in the interior of the country these freedoms continue to be violated, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. On July 2, the president's advisory council recommended holding general elections in 2006, the first since 1992. The 35-page report, "Unfinished Democracy: Media and Political Freedoms in Angola," notes that the detention and harassment of journalists has become less common since the decades-long civil war ended in 2002, and that Angolan authorities have become more tolerant of opposition political activity. However, these changes have largely been confined to the Angolan capital, Luanda.

KMT is Ayi Kwei Armah's seventh novel. It covers a lot of ground: ancient Egypt, Africa, Africans, intellectuals, scholars, education, scholarship, production and reproduction of knowledge, relationship between power and knowledge. On the inside cover Armah presents KMT as follows:

"KMT is a novel structured on an epistemic premise: that it is possible to envision Africa's multimillennial history as one coherent continental narrative, embracing all our space and time. The protagonists articulating that vision form a corpus of professional intellectuals whose destiny it's been to preserve Africa's consciousness, and whose fate it has also been, century after century, to betray the continent's most ancient values in the interests of personal survival. These are the scribes of ancient Egypt, the griots of the medieval empires, and the academic scholars of the age of structural adjustment. What those ancient values are, why they got suppressed, in what form they survived suppression, whether future generations can revitalize them - these are the issues addressed in this innovative novel."

The twenty-four chapters are divided into three unequal parts. Part one (the scholars) starts with the narrator (Lindela) confessing to the contradiction she had lived through: on the one hand trying to run away from her mission in order to achieve peace of mind, and on the other hand, so to speak, the mission constantly presenting itself and calling on her to act. What had caused her to seek forgetfulness was the loss of her best friend while attending a school (Whitecastle school) set up by well-meaning white colonizers to train future native leaders. Her dilemma is a familiar one: a witness of a crime who cannot help but respond to her conscience and speak the truth, whatever the cost.

Lindela's friend is named after the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa under Apartheid --Biko. Just like his namesake under Apartheid, Biko the young student, is intellectually brilliant, so much so that he becomes a threat to the teachers. The parallels between the BCM leader and Armah's Biko are striking, and the end is sadly predictable: in the confrontation between knowledge and power, the latter cannot but win and crush knowledge. To be intellectually superior to those who considered themselves at the top of the pyramid can be considered by the latter as one of the worst possible offences. And, thus, punished in the most severe form.

* Reviewed by Jacques Depelchin. Click on the link below for the rest of the review.