‘GOLDEN VOICE OF AFRICA’ DEFENDS MALI REVOLUTION

Salif Keïta, Mali’s leading artist and one of Africa’s legendary musicians, defended the revolution underway in Mali following its 2020 people-backed coup d’état. 

In an interview with a French media outlet banned in Mali, France 24, the interviewer asked Keïta, dubbed the ‘Golden Voice of Africa,’ multiple times to clarify his position on Malian President Assimi Goïta and what the interviewer referred to as ‘the junta,’ or the new government. 

Continued……According to Keïta, many Malians love Goïta for his government’s work to secure and reunify the country, scoring significant victories against t*rrorist groups. On 14 November 2023, the Malian Armed Forces liberated the region of Kidal, previously a stronghold for these violent extremist groups, which Mali has accused France and Ukraine of supporting.

The Malian government suspended in April 2022 both France 24 and Radio France International (RFI) after they had reportedly published fake news about Malian soldiers committing abuses. 

In December 2022, Burkina Faso also suspended RFI’s distribution after the news outlet aired a message from the leader of a t*rrorist organisation, Al-Qa*da in the Islamic Maghreb. Then, in March 2023, Burkina Faso suspended France 24 for broadcasting a ‘t*rrorist message.’ 

Niger suspended France 24 in August 2023, a week after the military ousted a Western-aligned leader.

Video credit: @france24

Sources

https://orinocotribune.com/mali-celebrates-liberation-of-kidal-from-separatist-groups/ https://www.la-croix.com/Monde/RFI-France-24-quels-pays-dAfrique-medias-francais-sont-ils-interdits-2023-08-04-1201277831

https://www.dakar-echo.com/apres-rfi-et-france24-lci-suspendu-au-mali-pour-deux-mois-pour-de-fausses-accusations/

https://apnews.com/article/france-24-burkina-faso-freedom-of-media-1156e777056a9171b482ce78da40a015

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/mali-accuses-france-of-training-terrorists-in-country

https://apnews.com/article/mali-ukraine-wagner-junta-embassy-rebel-russia-senegal-a471c7332369d154af57ad0816fb3504

SUDAN’S ARMY RETAKES PALACE IN KHARTOUM

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) announced on 22 March that on the previous day, it had regained control of the presidential palace in Khartoum from the United Arab Emirates-backed paramilitary group, Rapid Support Forces (RSF), following intense fighting.

On social media, Sudanese soldiers posted videos that appeared to show them inside the presidential palace, celebrating their success. The RSF had taken over the palace in April 2023 at the outbreak of the foreign-backed proxy war that has displaced 12.9 million people and left close to 25 million acutely hungry, according to the UN. In May 2024, US special envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello stated that as many as 150,000 had been k*lled after a year of fighting. The actual death toll could be higher given the war destroyed the healthcare system, preventing accurate data.

Continued……In recent months, the army has been making gains, initially reclaiming territory in central Sudan before shifting its focus to Khartoum. It broke the RSF’s nearly two-year siege on the General Command headquarters in January. Then, in mid-March, the army reported that its troops had converged from north and south Khartoum, effectively surrounding the RSF.

While the UN has accused both the SAF and the RSF of war crimes, the UN has singled out the UAE-supported RSF and its allied militia groups for widespread s*xual violence and atrocities in areas under their control, particularly in Western Darfur, where they have attempted an ethnic cleansing of the Masalit and other non-Arab tribes.  

Video credit: @warfareanalysis

Sources

https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-rsf-war-khartoum-c41e1d829ea2560c9ff8eb43daac85da

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160161

https://www.citizen.digital/news/sudan-army-recaptures-presidential-palace-from-rsf-after-fierce-battle-n359635

https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-rsf-war-khartoum-c41e1d829ea2560c9ff8eb43daac85da

https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-rsf-war-khartoum-c41e1d829ea2560c9ff8eb43daac85da

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2024/05/09/rsf-accused-war-crimes-ethnic-cleansing-darfur

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2025/03/sudan-army-makes-gains-battle-khartoum-intensifies

‘I’LL SPARK THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES THE WORLD!’

In this famous clip from a 1994 MTV News interview, hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur (1971-96), one of the most influential artists of the genre, explained to TV producer and writer Abbie Kearse why he continued to advocate for Black people and against the establishment, despite having ‘made it out’ of poverty himself.

Until his tragic murder in 1996, Tupac remained committed to amplifying the struggles of marginalised and disenfranchised Black people in the United States. The messages in his raps appealed to audiences globally. However, they also attracted the attention of those who viewed him as a threat to their establishment. Rather than choosing to play it safe and polite, his artistry relayed the realities of US society.

Continued……Three decades later, questions of racism, police brutality, and street violence, among many more issues that he wrote songs about, remain pervasive, disproportionately affecting Black people in the US.

In this interview, Tupac emphasised that his refusal to conform parallels his aspirations to see a better world. Therefore, even if he doesn’t change the world, he will not be so selfish as to not plant seeds for the ones who will.

Video credit: @MTVnews (X)

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/arts/music/tupac-shakur-death-legacy.html

https://vocal.media/history/tupac-shakur-the-legacy-of-a-revolutionary-artist

https://variety.com/2023/music/focus/tupac-music-hollywood-walk-of-fame-1235636404/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ogdenpayne/2016/09/13/20-years-later-tupac-shakurs-legacy-by-the-numbers/

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHOrL-qcwRU

NAMIBIAN HEALTHCARE WORKER DONS INDIGENOUS ATTIRE

As part of Namibia’s 35th Independence Day celebrations on 21 March, workers were encouraged to wear traditional dress, such as this medic donning Himba attire while caring for a patient.

This proud display of culture is a form of decolonisation as colonial rule forced Western attire onto indigenous peoples while Europeans plundered our continent. The looting continues today under the gaze of Western-aligned African leaders, all while Western attire remains associated with civility and professionalism. 

The Himba, a semi-nomadic pastoralist group primarily living in northern Namibia's Kunene region and southern Angola, speak a dialect of the Herero language. German colonial forces committed the 20th century’s first g*nocide by k*lling around 100,000 Herero and Nama people starting in 1904.

Continued……Himba fashion reflects their cultural identity, social status, spiritual beliefs, rites of passage, and adaptation to the Namib Desert’s extreme temperatures and aridity. The attire includes leather garments, intricate beadwork, and elaborate hairstyles coated with red ochre paste and butter fat, symbolising beauty, fertility and a connection to the ancestors. Jewellery made from beads, shells, bones, and metal also signifies social standing and life milestones, while hairstyles indicate age, marital status and community roles. 

Despite modern influences, the Himba, like their ancestors, continue to preserve their traditional attire as a vital expression of their heritage, ensuring its relevance for future generations.

Photo credit: @BassieBuzzing (X)

Sources

https://namibiatoday.com/the-unique-fashion-styles-of-namibias-himba-people/

https://x.com/MVAFundNamibia/status/1902983006127632646

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=928736642804566&id=100070047152304

https://x.com/_AfricanSoil/status/1903465629362840048

20th century's first genocide
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38530594

https://cultureandmind.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/fieldsites/himba

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1190801006379650&id=100063492856007

‘I’M NOT RACIST, I HAVE BLACK FRIENDS’ - ELON MUSK

Elon Musk’s father says his billionaire son cannot be racist because he had Black friends as a boy - namely, his servants! As if the ‘Black friends’ defence wasn’t bad enough, Errol Musk makes it worse by assuming the power relations between his son and servants were equal. He is either woefully - or willfully - ignorant of the fact that these ‘servants,’ as Black South Africans, were forced into subservient roles by a regime designed to oppress them. Pointing to good relations between (essentially) master and servant as proof of non-racism ignores the obvious. The servants had no choice but to be friendly to their boss’s son. The extreme power imbalance in these interactions made it impossible to see them as genuine connections rather than coerced dynamics.

Continued……Elon Musk himself has done little to assuage doubt. The billionaire endorsed a tweet suggesting Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and shouldn’t become pilots. He adopted a similar stance during an interview with Don Lemon, attributing hypothetical adverse medical outcomes to Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion programmes despite evidence to the contrary. When swastikas and nooses were found at Tesla, not only did the company (whose largest shareholder is Musk) refuse to investigate complaints or take steps to end abuse, it retaliated against Black employees who complained or opposed the abuse.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. When explaining why he imported emeralds from an unregistered mine in Zambia, Errol Musk said, “[otherwise] you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.” He also fondly remembers apartheid South Africa, describing it as a “well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all.” Failing to recognise the apartheid regime itself as a crime - against humanity, no less.

Sources
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-dad-friends-black-servants-b2719651.html

https://futurism.com/civil-rights-groups-horrified-elon-musk-racist

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/elon-musk-racist-tweets-science-video/

On 25 March 1931, nine Black boys in Alabama, USA were wrongly charged with rap*ng White woman. They were initially sentenced to death, but this was overturned and retrials were ordered - sparking a mass (nationwide and global) campaign under the banner ‘They Must Not Die!’ aimed at preventing a legal lynching of the so-called Scottsboro Boys.

The case also reminds us of George Stinney Jr, executed in 1944, accused of killing two White girls, and Emmet Till, lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman, who later admitted the accusation was a lie.

It was a pivotal moment in Black history in the United States that would impact generations to come. The international struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys led to the largest resistance movement against racism in the US justice system in history.

Continued….. The global reach of the case was so far that a Sedition Bill was passed in Ghana (then the British colony of the Gold Coast) to prevent Africans from agitating in support of the Scottsboro Boys.

While the case did officially bring about certain legal reforms to the carceral system, such as mandating the presence of Black jurors in cases with Black defendants, this would often go unenforced throughout the 20th century and into the present.

In one example, Black revolutionary Assata Shakur was sentenced to life in prison by an all-White jury. In 1986, a court ruled that race could not be used as a factor in the initial establishment of a jury pool. In 2021, there were two high-profile cases in which nearly all-White juries acquitted White men for shooting and killing Black men - the murders of Jake Blake and Ahmaud Arbery.

Africans in the United States and throughout the diaspora continue to struggle against a racist criminal justice system in which they are disproportionally incarcerated.

REMEMBERING VICTIMS OF SLAVERY

On every 25 March since 2007, the United Nations has observed the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 

We must first note that African Stream refers to this event as the European slave trade, as we put the responsibility on the people who forced slavery upon our ancestors rather than blaming the body of water through which the ships sailed.

Europeans kidnapped and forcibly transported between 10 million and 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas to be sold into slavery beginning in the late 15th century.

The Portuguese started trading Africans, but the Spanish, Dutch, English and French soon joined. The trade reached its peak in the 18th century.

Continued……Slavery allowed European settler-colonists to till occupied land in the Americas for the raw materials needed to make products to sell worldwide, allowing the burgeoning economic system called capitalism to evolve from mercantilism to industrialism to the finance capitalism we see today. Meanwhile, the trade depopulated parts of Africa while creating a comprador class of African leaders who sold out their people.

As the trade came to a close, European powers carved up Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, providing certain European states with control over different parts of Africa to loot the continent’s resources. The racial hierarchy that slavery imposed exists today, with Western financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, imposing austerity, labour deregulation and currency devaluations that loot wealth and lower living standards.

CARICOM, a Caribbean regional body, now claims $33 trillion from Europe. Meanwhile, a US consulting firm, Brattle Group, calculated in 2024 that all enslaving countries owed between $100 trillion to $131 trillion to 31 countries.

As we remember the victims of the horrific European slave trade, we should not forget that imperialist shackles remain in Africa and the Americas.

Sources

https://bvinews.com/caribbean-asks-europe-for-33-trillion-in-reparations

https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1837/slavery-in-plantation-agriculture/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zxt3gk7/revision/1

https://actionaid.org/publications/2023/fifty-years-failure-imf-debt-and-austerity-africa

https://www.un.org/en/observances/transatlantic-slave-trade

https://caricomreparations.org

https://www.brattle.com/insights-events/publications/brattle-consultants-quantify-reparations-for-transatlantic-chattel-slavery-in-pro-bono-paper

‘SOUTH AFRICA BORDERS ARE OPEN, RACISTS CAN GO TO U.S.’

White settlers in South Africa are free to leave.

That’s according to Julius Malema (@julius_s_malema on X, @julius.malema.sello on IG), founder and president of South Africa’s Pan-Africanist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, who made these remarks at the annual Sharpeville Massacre Rally on 21 March.

The settlers, who have amassed over 70 per cent of South Africa’s privately owned farmland while only making up a little over 7 per cent of the population, have refused to take US President Donald Trump’s offer to re-settle as refugees in the US despite alleging a ‘white g*nocide’ is waged against them. Instead, they encouraged Trump to punish South Africa’s attempts at rectifying wealth inequality through a new land reform law.

Continued……Despite apartheid officially ending in 1994, the regime, which was supported by the US through economic, military and diplomatic means, created stark inequalities that remain today. As a result, Black South Africans, who comprise over 80 per cent of the population, own only 4 per cent of private farmland.

The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre that Malema remarked on represents one of the darkest days during apartheid. On 21 March that year, the regime shot live bullets into a crowd of unarmed protesters who called for abolishing South Africa’s discriminatory pass laws. Apartheid authorities k*lled 69 Black South Africans and wounded nearly 200, including 50 women and children. 

Video credit: @effsouthafrica

Sources

https://actsa.org/the-facts-land-reform-in-south-africa/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4187823

https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2025-03-22-in-pics-malema-eff-commemorate-human-rights-day-in-sharpeville

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/opinion/human-rights-day-sharpeville-massacre-united-the-world-against-apartheid-but-sa-sporting-isolation-took-too-long-ask-the-all-blacks-44c37c6a-2d5e-4b40-a889-caa53077c5bc

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-10-09-declassified-apartheid-profits-american-guns

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/9/no-thanks-white-south-africans-turn-down-trumps-us-immigration-offer

https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201802/landauditreport13feb2018.pdf

WATCH OUT FOR FAKE NEWS ON BURKINA FASO!

Burkina Faso may be the ‘land of the upright people,’ but some popular posts and reports online might not live up to its integrity.

In this video, we talk about the proliferation of ‘fake news’ regarding Burkina Faso, which mostly seems positive, but may detract from the actual gains of the revolution occurring in Africa’s Sahel region. However, at African Stream, we do our due diligence to verify claims and check in with Burkina Faso sources to get our information in order.

Have you recently raised your eyebrows at suspicious-sounding information about the Sahel? Let us know if you’ve noticed the sensationalism and, if so, what types of seemingly fake news stories you’ve peeped.

Hear Us Roar: https://news.1rj.ru/str/AfricanStream

Continued…. Sources

https://groundup.org.za/article/judge-rules-kill-boer---kill-farmer-not-hate-speech/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-white-refugee-afrikaner-south-africa-0fbca411470d3b439886cabc12c7600d