T H E   T O U R

T H E  S P E A K E R S

The Africa Peace Tour will commence its Spring 2004 Tour through parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey on 27 March 2004. The Tour will run until 2 April 2004 and is focusing on Southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. The Tour strives to promote citizen action for a more people oriented US policy toward Africa. The 2004 Tour is taking place in the middle of the Democratic party primaries, which suggest that grave issues will be discussed and debated publicly. These issues relate to how voters perceive Democratic candidates who will be striving to replace President Bush in the White House. The war in Iraq seems to be the issue around which there will be much political struggle. Whether the decision is to continue U.S. involvement in Iraq or when and how to withdraw will have a tremendous effect on U.S. Africa policy in the 21st century. It is our hope that students, faculties and other citizens begin to look at current US Africa policy and join the effort to engage in the policy making process, one that hopefully benefits Africa and Africans. The 5-day, two state Africa Peace Tour will include nearly twenty venues in area communities.

The year 2004 Africa Peace Tour participants will assess US policy toward Africa. Some of the issues they will be discussing are: African debt, slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, foreign aid, arms transfers, international lending, genocide, land disposition, HIV-AIDS and western responses to natural disasters in Africa.

Speakers

Bakary Tandia

Bakary is a human rights activist from Mauritania. He has been especially active on the issue of slavery in Mauritania and the lack of southern representation in the Mauritanian government. He also raises concerns around land expropriation, physical abuse against Africans, and forced exile of Africans and others who oppose President Taya's government. He was the key exile figure who worked to free imprisoned antislavery leader Boubacar Messaoud. Bakary was active lobbying UN missions, NGO's, the US State Department and other European countries to apply pressure to the Mauritanian government to release Boubacar. He played a major role at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in August/September 2001. It was his intervention at a plenary session that challenged the South Africans present to speak out against slavery on the African continent. Winnie Mandela and Dennis Brutus immediately spoke out on the issue. Bakary is an impressive and clear speaker.

Nozipo Glenn

Nozipo is a member of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa). She has been active in South African politics since she was 16 years old. Nonzero was in exile in Dayton, Ohio, for 23 years. In 1995, she visited South Africa for the first time in 23 years. Nozipo is a regular on the Africa Peace Tour not because she likes the physical difficulties of the tour, but because she is the one person that audiences consistently request to visit a second time. She speaks to people in clear, unambiguous language, and seems to challenge people to understand African issues. In this Tour she will raise the issue of land and urge audiences to understand what it means to have your land taken by people and forces from outside the continent. She has continuously noted that landlessness, and the issue of historically stolen lands, and attempts by local people to recover their land drives much of the violence in Africa, from Zimbabwe and South Africa to Kenya.

Ibrahima Sarr

IIbrahima is a member of the Mauritanian National assembly. After being elected to the assembly, the government banned his party. He is a well known Mauritanian journalist. He is also known for his work against slavery, for justice and against discrimination by the government of Mauritanians who have maintained their culture and languages. He was jailed for four years at one of Mauritania's infamous desert prisons - Oualata. He is a poet and writer. His works have been used by a number of major Senegalese singers and storytellers, including the well known mega star Baaba Maal.

Ingrid Richards

Ingrid is from Liberia, but is in exile in the United States. Recently, she was in South Africa for six weeks working with HIV-AIDS patients and orphans. She says she was changed by the experience, in the sense that she watched very desperate people struggle to live and to care for their children and then to die without knowing how their children will survive. She now argues that we must find ways to stop this disease and to care for its victims. Essentially she feels that this disease must be stopped and it must be by people working together.She also wonders why and how this disease spread so rapidly in Africa.

Richelle is from the United States. She just returned from Africa where she served two and half years in the Peace Corp in the Ivory Coast. She will describe her stay, the conditions that the people in her village live under and her sense of what drives the current civil war. She was evacuated from the Ivory Coast when the war began. The Ivory Coast was thought to be one of Africa’s economic success stories. She is on the Tour to give her sense of how U.S. policy plays out at the village level in Africa.